Nebulopathy

Unprepared

2012-02-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I realize that I missed some important class in becoming an adult. For instance, I've lived in this house almost ten years, and for ten years I've been meaning to buy a kitchen table. I still don't have a kitchen table.

I have a picture in my head of the type of table I want (rectangular, all wood, one solid piece, square legs), but as to how to find that sort of thing, I have no idea. So I just don't have a kitchen table.

I have a couch that is pretty much the definition of a bio-hazard. It was mostly okay when I got it (from my brother) but it was already at least ten years old at that point. I've had it another ten years, and a few of those years the couch served as the dog bed for the blind, occasionally-incontinent wonder dog. Scooter has also had his way with that couch. I don't sit on that couch. It's just taking up space in the living room. But buying a new couch and getting rid of the old one requires a level of planning that I just don't possess. That was in the Becoming An Adult 101 class as well.

I have a television that I haven't plugged in for three years. I never bought a digital converter box, so even if I wanted to use it I couldn't. I'd throw it out or take it to e-waste, but I can't lift it, so it will sit in the (unused) entertainment center with the (unused) DVD player and (unused) stack of CDs until either the house burns down or someone else moves in.

Is this why people get married?

I Love 'em Like Brothers

2012-02-16T23:03:00.000-08:00

Rvan and Jeff were in Texas at some management meeting earlier in the week (I know, the fact that they sent Jeff to one of these things is funny all by itself), which gave Rvan and his boss and her boss yet another chance to giggle about the fact that HR rejected my application.

Jeff won his own heavy glass ~~weapon~~ award for complaining the most. Or maybe it was for outstanding leadership. We'll just say it's for something I'll never be qualified for.

One of the highlights of Jeff's trip was spending too much time in the hot tub and then realizing the next morning that he didn't know where his (only pair of) shoes were. Luckily the hotel staff kept better track of his stuff than he did.

In the meantime, Eric has been trying to tell me the joys of the Korean ~~soap operas~~ dramas that he's been watching lately. Apparently it's just bad luck to be a cute, non-obnoxious child in a Korean drama. Also, the suitable male doctor in the love triangle ("and there's always a love triangle") never gets the girl.

Eric told his Korean friend what he was watching and her response was "You should come to Korea and watch the dramas with the rest of the grandmothers."

You have to love stuff like this.

It may not be a coincidence...

2012-02-12T22:02:00.001-08:00

I spent about five hours implementing a Rube Goldberg-esque solution to the problem of Microsoft Outlook lacking features developed in the 80s, so while my brain was relaxing I noticed something interesting on Facebook...

In the right sidebar (which I usually don't even look at), it has two pages recommended, the first of which is "Dancing". Now I'm not really sure why I would "like" a page for something so generic as dancing, but apparently almost 12,000,000 people have. Whatever, I thought, some people will "like" anything.

Directly below it was the "Sponsored" section with an ad from Starbucks, home of the "nothing under five hundred calories" drink. I haven't been to a Starbucks in probably about two years -- I don't really drink coffee and I found everything they sold to be overpriced (okay, fine) and too sweet. It was that latter bit that really blows my mind. I've had three boxes of Good & Plentys in the last week, so clearly a little processed sugar doesn't bother me, but every time I've had food from Starbucks I've taken a few bites and thought "wow, this is too sweet even for me". (And then, I'll be honest, I've finished it anyhow because that's what I do, but still.)

Anyhow, over 28 million people have "liked" Starbucks.

That pretty much explains a lot of things...

Soon the CEO will be calling...

2012-02-09T23:52:00.000-08:00

In case I didn't believe that the whole world was conspiring to laugh at me already:

Today my boss (Rvan) got to chuckle with his boss' boss about the fact that my application to be hired for the job I already do was rejected by HR.

Paranoid? Me?

Never.

Mamma Mia Suck-a

2012-02-05T21:38:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I make fun of Jeff not being able to get out the door with everything he needs to ride home every day, and yet every time I feel like watching a movie I can't remember the name of any movie that I thought might be good to see. I watch fewer than ten movies a year, and I know more than that come out every year where I see the trailer and thing "Hm, maybe I'll watch that when it comes out on iTunes." However, my hash table is essentially one direction, so I can't get information when I want to get a list of movies that I had that thought for.

Anyhow, while browsing through stuff on iTunes yesterday I saw Mamma Mia, The Movie. I'm not a huge fan of musicals, but this movie had a cast full of people I've liked in other roles (Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth) and while it's a tad embarrassing to admit, I sort of like some ABBA songs.

Wow. That's the first time I've gotten through a movie with a run time of 1:48:36 in less than an hour. After about twenty minutes I started skipping forward to see if it got any better. It didn't. The actors all seemed vaguely ashamed. The scenery wasn't that great. Even the extras seemed to realize how bad this thing was.

I don't know. Maybe I'm not the target audience. Maybe it worked out better as a stage production. Maybe they should have made Colin Firth lose some weight and his shirt. Anything would have improved this clunker. I swear some of my friends have recommended this movie in the past.

This is why I watch bad action films instead. At least I know what I'm getting into before I waste two hours of my life.

Forget It

2012-02-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

You know, they say that exercise keeps the brain sharp, but whoever did that study didn't interview Jeff.

He rides his bike to work almost every day it isn't raining.

And every day when it's time to go home, he changes back into his shorts, puts on the funny biking shoes, and grabs his helmet, backpack, and gloves (covered with duct tape to make them resist the wind better) and then walks out the door with his bike. Or, that's what he tries to do.

Instead, at least 50% of the time, he leaves and then I hear the doors reopen and he walks back to his cubicle to get whichever of the things he's left behind. Usually it's his gloves, but sometimes it's his helmet, or his backpack, or his shoes, or his phone, or pretty much anything that isn't actually attached.

It's gotten to the point where I start naming items he might have forgotten as he walks his bike past my cubicle towards the door, sort of like a weird game of bingo, but I have yet to name the item he's forgotten before he leaves.

Ah well, he's always been good for a laugh...

What Time Do They Serve Breakfast Here?

2012-01-29T21:44:00.000-08:00

Since I've broken three alarm clocks in the last two years (sorry, Karen, you didn't still want that one you left behind did you?), I've just been winging it when getting up in the morning.

After all, it doesn't really matter all that much when I get to work, and if I get in too early it increases the percentage of hours that I'm there when our users are sending irritating email. It's just better for everyone involved if I have at least a couple of hours at work when I don't get any email.

However, on the days that I do drive in to work, I really do try to get there in time for lunch, and that's where the problem comes in during the winter months. I really need to get out of bed by about 8AM in order to have time to feed the cats, feed the dogs, feed the birds, walk the dogs, pack dinner, take a shower, get dressed, clean up after all the freaking animals in the house, and then drive to work in time to walk in the door, put my stuff down, and immediately leave for lunch.

While technically it is light outside by at least 7AM these days, when it's cloudy it seems to be about the same level of light from about 7 to 9. Sure, I could get a clock and put it on the wall (yes, a really, really big clock since I can't see anything without my glasses on), but where would be the fun in that? Instead, I try to pick up on more subtle cues.

1. If I roll over in bed:

< 6AM: the cats all remain in place except for the ones that take up even more space and force me further over the edge of the bed. The big dog continues to snore.
Between 6-7: most of the cats remain in place, but one or two jump off the bed. The big dog continues to snore.
Between 7-8: all the cats except one jump off the bed and run to the kitchen. The remaining cat bites any skin visible outside the sheets and is launched off the bed. The cats return within two minutes and settle back in. The big dog continues to snore.
After 8: all the cats except one jump off the bed and run into the kitchen. The remaining cat continues to bite me and be launched off the bed. The other cats play high speed Monopoly with my pillow being Go. The big dog continues to snore.

2) If I hide my face from the cat trying to bite me by letting my head hang over the edge of the bed:

Before 7AM: no problem. The big dog continues to snore.
7-8: the little dog jumps up and licks my face. The big dog continues to snore.
After 8: the little dog whines every time I take a breath and continues jumping up and licking my face. The big dog continues to snore.

3) If I sit up in bed:

Before 6AM: None of the animals are fooled. They go back to sleep. The big dog continues to snore.
6-8: General pandemonium. The big dog continues to snore.
After 8: General pandemonium. The big dog checks to see if I'm actually getting up. If so, she rolls around on her back until I make it out the bedroom door and then climbs/falls off the bed. If not she goes back to snoring.

As you can see, I can pretty accurately determine when 8AM rolls around, assuming I move around enough. You can also see that I don't get a lot of sleep after 6AM. There are days I consider going to a motel to get a good night's sleep.

Move It

2012-01-26T22:09:00.000-08:00

There's a really cool (even, dare I say it, inspirational?) video making the rounds by Dr. Mike Evans:

(If embedding isn't working for you, here's the link 23 1/2 Hours.)
I like it because it's really well done, and (as Rvan would say) they "did some science on it".

And here's the anecdotal evidence to support the fact that being inactive will kill you:

On Monday I managed to tweak my upper back while sitting in my chair at work doing nothing, and that was while I was still recovering from the weekend when I hurt my shoulder while rolling over in bed.

As Jon says, you have to expect some health problems as you get older, but really? At 43?

An Uneventful Week

2012-01-22T22:54:00.000-08:00

While trying to come up with this post, I went through my standard question of "What happened during the last week?"

It turns out this is not a good question for me since really often the answer is: Nothing. In the past, this has led to me risking my coronary arteries by going to the county fair purely so I would have something to talk about.

This week, though, I'll just turn it around and talk about what didn't happen this week:

- The Superbowl (or even the Superbowel): I try really, really hard to avoid all sports coverage. So when the level of Facebook comments and ads trickling through my brain filters goes above a certain level, I assume some pseudo-serious event happened. Anyhow, I was rejoicing last Monday because the football coverage could now go away for another year, and Rvan and Jeff just laughed at me. Bastards.

- Becoming an employee: I'm always somewhat shocked to be gainfully employed because I know in my heart of hearts that if I lose my current job nobody will hire me ever again because I don't really have any skills. (I've thought this about every job I've ever had.)

This week it has turned out to be true. Despite the fact that they've created an employee position specifically for me in the job that I've been doing for the last three years, my online application was rejected by the HR department.

Yes, let me repeat that: I can't get hired for the job I currently have. What kind of idiot can't fill out an online application? This kind of idiot.

Worse, since I've been thrown back into "contractor" status from the coveted (but apparently non-applicable) "statement of work" status, my contracting pimps have to treat me as a new hire and are currently conducting background checks for 1) the terror watch list, 2) registered sex offenders list, and 3) my employment history for the last seven years. (I swear I'm not making any of this up.) I hope both teaching hospitals enjoy answering questions about me for my programming job.

Whatever.

Just Run With It

2012-01-19T23:44:00.000-08:00

So... as one of my perpetual attempts to regain the physique that I actually never had, I've decided to take up running.

I remember being able to run fairly effortlessly as a kid, and distance running was my thing for a while (mostly because I was never fast enough to beat anyone in a sprint). Then something happened. High school zapped all of the joint strength or something, and I've never been able to really run like that again.

But this year is going to be different. (Unless this year is the same.) Not only did I buy a new pair of shoes, I bought a little doohickey that hooks up to my iPod and keeps track of how far I run and what route I took and how fast I went.

I got it in the mail last week.

Yes. It's still in the box.

The Win(e) Cellar

2012-01-15T21:49:00.000-08:00

Jeff reminded me last week that I hadn't posted the current contribution from the real estate wine of the year club, so here it is:

The newest bottle (2010) is on the left. It's a little disturbing that the color seems to go from a cheerful pink in the new bottle (which seems wrong for something labeled as "white zinfandel" although what do I know about wine?) to a muddy orange in a bottle that is only five years old. I'm not sure what happened to 2008. Surely I didn't drink it... At this point it's a science experiment. I'm not sure what the hypothesis is yet. Possibly something about the strength of the top shelf of the cabinet and the idiocy of someone who lives in earthquake country storing bottles of wine there.

While I had the camera out, I took tonight's picture of Ripley sitting in a bag:

Clearly the bag is a zen-like area, ripe for peaceful contemplation while other things are happening around you. Sort of like my cubicle on the days I'm not there.

Sign Language

2012-01-12T21:58:00.000-08:00

The other night Eric and I were discussing something of actual importance -- the need for certain agreed-upon hand gestures to be made to other drivers.

Yes, everyone knows the signal for "I am very unhappy with that thing you just did" even if the gesture is slightly different in different countries. That's a no-brainer.

However, what we decided that are really lacking are the following:

1) "Wow, I almost ran you off the road -- it was completely my fault and I'm really sorry!" This is the one that started off the conversation. Everyone be honest now, we've all had at least one occasion when this would have been appropriate. (And if you really think you've never done something like that... you have, you just weren't paying attention.)

The proposed gesture is an open-handed weak wave, but you really have to be careful that all your fingers can be seen. The alternate proposed gesture is to slink down in the seat and accelerate as quickly as possible.

2) "One of your headlights is out." Eric claims that this one has a definition, which is to get behind the person and flash your high beams. However, in my driving experience, that would be mistaken for "Get out of the fast lane, idiot" unless you're sitting at a traffic light at the time.

3) "Your turn signal has been on for the last three miles." It's not always old people. Just almost always.

4) "Your wheel just fell off!" Eric claims he was able to successfully convey this to the passenger in a truck pulling a horse trailer via sweeping hand movements coupled with pointing to the trailer and showing a very concerned look.

5) "Your truck is on fire!" I tried with this one, I really did, but when I pulled up next to the cab to signal that the coupling between the two trailers was in flames, I would have needed to make a hole in my roof in order to see the other driver because his cab was so high. Honking and flashing my lights didn't accomplish anything. And then I gave up because, you know, my exit was right there.

This is really the sort of thing that should be covered in the DMV booklet.

Anyone have any additions or proposals?

The Writing Is On The Cabinet Doors

2012-01-08T22:08:00.000-08:00

I've owned two houses, both of which were previously owned by old women. Maybe I only like the "old-lady-house" vibe, although actually, since I chose one house sight-unseen, it's possible that real estate agents just nudge me towards those houses.

Anyhow, both houses had a bunch of writing on the inside of the cabinet doors in the kitchen. In Baton Rouge it was an scrawl of people's names and phone numbers, with the handwriting getting progressively shakier.

Here in Woodland I get:

and

I didn't even know Toyota was selling cars in the US in 1971.

My house-buying experience in Baton Rouge is a small example of how Louisiana is just a little different from more normal places.

First off, I drove there in a rented minivan with seven cats, a dog, and three birds that quickly associated rest stops with french fries and thus started screaming (loudly) every time the speed dropped to less than 65 mph. In the middle of summer. By myself. I spent the last two days of the three day drive trying to get in touch with my real estate agent who 1) knew when I was supposed to arrive, and 2) was supposed to arrange for me to sign the papers the day I got there so I had somewhere to put all of the animals since leaving them in the car in 100 F heat wasn't an option.

Naturally my real estate agent called me back at 9am an hour before I got to Baton Rouge and told me she was in New Orleans, but she would be back later that evening. So I found my new house and sat in the minivan all day until she finally showed up. That's when I found out that I wasn't going to be signing any papers because the house was owned by the estate of the (deceased) previous owner, and they hadn't gotten all the heirs to sign off yet. However, they'd agreed to let me stay in the house until the papers were signed. (I got the impression this was supposed to happen in the next few days.) Also, they would really appreciate it if I would allow the medical supply company to have access to all of the rented equipment that was still sitting in the house. (After a week of the medical supply company making appointments to come get the stuff and not showing up, I finally moved it all outside and told them they might want to pick it up before someone took it.)

I kept calling my agent once a week to find out what the status was and she kept saying they were waiting. I lived in that house for over two months before I ever signed any papers. If they'd dragged it out another ten months it would have been the best financial decision I'd ever made...

Anyhow, the heirs finally did sign off on everything, so on signing day I dashed out of the hospital and went to my agent's office. The seller (one of the family members) and her agent had gone to school together and were old friends. In fact, they were such good friends that they'd gone out to lunch together earlier, and were halfway between tipsy and flat-out drunk during the meeting. We kept having to stop turning pages to the next signing point so they could laugh about things. In fact, nobody but me seemed to be concerned about how long it was taking, but I guess I was the only one with an afternoon appointment schedule.

Anyhow, everything was eventually signed and I left quickly because I was late and also because that meant the seller and her agent wouldn't be on the road with me.

When I left ten months later, I pretty much just tossed the house keys to my agent (the mother of my previous agent since the daughter had since quit the business) and told her to call me when she found a buyer. Then I drove off in the rented minivan for the trip back to California, where at least some people are sane.

I'll leave you with a picture of Ripley sitting in a bag. Because that's his favorite thing to do.

Schrödinger's Staycation: Day 1

2012-01-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else who suffered through college physics without actually needing any of it afterward, my recollection is limited to vague memories of wave pools, vectors, and Greek letters.

(I also remember the second quarter professor who had us all stand around a table holding hands and ran a current through all eleven honors physics students -- just before he grabbed the second terminal he stopped and said "Nobody here has any heart conditions, do they?")

Anyhow, one of the more often referenced bits is the part about Schrödinger's cat, the explanation of an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the quantum state of something is both possibilities until it is measured, at which time only one state remains. In the needlessly feline-phobic example, a cat is kept in a box with a radioactive substance. If the substance decays, acid is released, killing the cat. If the substance doesn't decay, the cat sits there and waits from some idiot to let it out of the box whereupon it will make its displeasure known. However, until the box is opened (and the "measurement" takes place), the cat is both dead and alive. And probably highly pissed off either way.

So yeah, in this case, there are three categories of people who might work at my desk and I currently don't fit in any of them, so I'm not working. Yep, three possibilities -- that's how competitive I am -- I've taken Schrödinger and one-upped him. In any case, I'm now taking a well-deserved, if unplanned, vacation. Unless I actually don't have a job any more, in which case I'm enjoying being unemployed. I won't know until the box gets opened. (Either way, someone is going to have a mess to clean up in here, just saying...)

You can see that the stress of not knowing is killing me. I had to sleep in until 11am this morning just to get over it.

Trip Over the Lights Fantastic

2012-01-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

After a solid week of carb-loading in preparation for the marathon that I haven't yet scheduled, I'm back home again.

Since there are still some cookies left, I decided to take a long walk to work off some calories and also to make it physically impossible to eat every waking hour. This being Woodland, the holiday decorations are still up.

All I can really say is that there are a lot of people with more electricity than taste. A lot more electricity. Perhaps, just perhaps, when you buy a new set of lights/plastic soldiers/neon candy canes/blow up Santas/moving reindeer you should consider retiring just one of the previous years' contributions.

But no, it's like a bazaar of kitsch, all on one lawn. One tree is covered in orange and green lights, one tree is covered in multiple strands of white lights (which includes only one strand that goes on and off on a ten second cycle), two thirds of the house has white icicle lights and the remaining third of the house has blue blinking lights, the plastic drummer boy has shorted out near the mailbox (possibly aided by the neighbors), and the Mickey Mouse Santa is inflating and deflating in time to the power surges. Sadly, this isn't confined to one house, either.

One house had cords strung at eye level (for me) across the path to the front door, from which I deduce that everyone who lives there is shorter than I am. And they don't want any tall visitors.

The fire station down the street has only one string of lights, and their sign currently reads "Woodland Fire Department: making house calls since 1870".

I can see why.

Long Winter's Nap

2011-12-22T22:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not exactly known for being a high energy bundle at the best of times. If competitive sleeping were a sport, I'd be an olympic athlete. I have no problem with getting up on Saturday, feeding all the animals, and then going back to bed for five or six hours. And then I might take a nap after lunch.

But now it's going to be even worse. I bought an electric blanket for the bed. No more shivering for ten minutes when going to bed, and there's really no incentive to ever get out of bed. Really, the electric blanket could be the downfall of civilization.

Wake me up when it's Spring.

So Demanding

2011-12-18T22:27:00.000-08:00

You know how rockstars go on tours and have riders in their contracts that specify all kinds of odd things (eg, two pounds of M&Ms with all of the red ones taken out, an E-Z bake oven in the green room, etc.)? I'm trying to figure out how to get that kind of thing written into a contract if I have to become an employee.

Because, let's face it, becoming an employee at this point would majorly increase the suckitude of my life. I'd have to leave the house five days a week, I'd be expected to answer my phone again, and worse yet, I'd have a yearly review. If I'm bad at my job, just fire me, or tell me there's a problem the minute it comes up. Don't save it up to spring on me once a year. That just causes stress. (Clearly I'm not cut out for management. This comes as no surprise to anyone.)

On the plus side, I'd get to keep my job, and since I absolutely hate changing jobs, that's a big plus.

So anyhow, since I probably won't be able to actually affect anything important like wages if I get hired, I'm thinking that I ought to try to get a list of outrageous demands included somehow. I just need a suitable list.

In case anyone needs me, I'll be reviewing contract riders for the next few weeks...

The Village of Idiots

2011-12-15T22:53:00.000-08:00

People think I'm kidding when I say that both of my dogs are stupid, but it really is true. Ginger looks like a rocket scientist compared to Molly, but they both belong on the short bus. (Please note that I'm not saying my dogs aren't lovable and sweet -- they're great pets and I don't have a job for a dog that needs constant stimulus.)

A few weeks ago I did an impromptu intelligence test just to see what would happen. While both dogs were watching, I filled two short cardboard tubes with kibble and folded over the ends. Again, both dogs watched me do this. I gave one tube to each dog and observed the results.

Molly took her cardboard tube into the living room and proceeded to eat it, cardboard and all. She even ate the pieces that hadn't made contact with the kibble.

Ginger ignored the tube and stared at me, with the same intense stare she uses any time she thinks I might give her food. After a few minutes I shook the tube (nothing), then I opened one end (still nothing), then I even shook out a few pieces. She gulped down the kibble that was on the floor, but still wouldn't look at the tube which still had one or two pieces in it.

Finally Molly came over and took Ginger's tube into the living room and ate her second helping of cardboard.

Apparently life really is like a box of chocolate. Especially if you don't even bother to open it before eating.

The Next Career Probably Won't Be Carpentry

2011-12-11T21:56:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to bring order into my chaotic life (and why exactly do I still not have a personal assistant?) I decided to put together the second dresser that has been in pieces on my bedroom floor for the last... six months? nine months? some embarrassingly long amount of time anyhow.

The dresser has four drawers, three of which are the same size. So while I continued my "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" marathon (don't judge), I put together the first two. I even used wood glue this time, because the front of the large drawer fell off on the one that I built last year (or whenever it was).

I got to the third identical drawer and ran into a snag. No matter which way I turned the pieces there were two right sides and no left. (I'm guessing that this was why it was still in pieces on my bedroom floor although quite possibly I hadn't noticed and it was just due to pure laziness.)

A more organized person would still have the receipt, original packaging, and inclination to return the dresser to the place I bought it. I, on the other hand, remember how heavy the damn thing is, and I have no desire to try to explain why I let it sit for a year without returning it. Besides, I'm an engineer (more or less) and my belief is that I can fix anything. (I have a lot of broken things in pieces around my house and garage that belie this idea, but I'm strong in the power of denial.)

Really, though, how hard can it be to turn a right panel into a left panel? Remember, everything I know about carpentry I learned in orthopedic surgery, so you know I must be good at it.*

I drilled some holes for the dowels and a few screw hole guides. It was all good until I got to the doohicky that ties into some sort of toggle bolt that is supposed to hold the front of the drawer on. (We didn't use toggle bolts in any of my surgeries, so I have no idea what this thing is called. I do know it doesn't work very well, which is why the front of the big drawer fell off.)

Anyhow, it required me to drill a large-bore hole halfway through the wood. The hole was bigger than any of my drill bits. I almost got it, but then it turned out something was a fraction off, so I finally gave up and decided that the wood glue was just going to need to do double duty on this drawer.

So... all of the drawers are together now. They might even stay together. We'll just have to see how things go when the glue dries.

-----
* Just as a note, my very last orthopedic surgery was on a barn owl with a fractured humerus. I put in an intramedulary pin with an external tie-in. The post-op x-rays were beautiful. The six week checkup was great. I pulled the pins and then the freaking owl got his wing caught in the corner of the flight cage just before being released and the whole wing shattered into a bazillion pieces and I euthanized him. There's your feel-good story of the day.

My brain, it's like a squirrel running on a wheel. Eating cookies.

2011-12-08T23:13:00.000-08:00

I got home the other night and was getting ready to go to bed when the thought hit me -- there was still one cookie left.

Yes, I intentionally put the cookies on the top of the refrigerator where I can't see them in hopes that I will forget about them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

In this case, once I thought about the last, lonely cookie sitting forlorn in the wastelands of my kitchen, that's all I could really think about. Funny video? Sure, but oh yeah, there's a cookie in the kitchen. Email from my friend? Nice, but there's a cookie in the kitchen.

So finally I said (literally, I said this out loud) "Screw it. I'm eating that cookie." And then I took down the box and found out that there was not one, but two cookies.

At that point there was only one thing to do. Yes, again out loud: "Screw it. I'm eating both of those cookies."

This is why I can't bring home things with sugar.

Leaves Me Alone

2011-12-04T21:53:00.000-08:00

The slogan for my hometown is "City of Trees" and this really becomes evident in late Fall when there's always one week when all of the trees shed their leaves overnight. This year, that was Wednesday. In my fairly small front yard, I raked up a pile of leaves that dwarfed my car. Sure, you can argue that it's not that impressive because I have a Honda Civic, not an SUV, but I still find it hard to believe because none of those leaves were from any of my trees.

Apparently complaining about other people's leaves falling on your lawn is genetic because when I mentioned this to my parents, they told me that my mother's father complained about the same thing. I may not have inherited the skinny height and wiry strength, but I got the complaining gene.

Anyhow, I've decided that raking leaves is a good upper body workout, justifying the ingestion of an extra thousand or two calories for the day.

I'm blaming my neighbors and their damned trees for all the weight I'll be gaining over the next few weeks.

Safe Harbor

2011-12-01T23:15:00.000-08:00

It's always a good sign when your not-really-a-boss asks if you might want to take a year off.

The answer is yes, but only if someone else is paying my bills. Since that seems a little unlikely, I'll do what I always do and ignore the issue until it either goes away or I have to do something about it.

It could be worse, of course -- I could be harboring a budding juvenile delinquent like my nephew Liam. Somehow I made it through all of my schooling without getting in trouble for anything other than my unwillingness to do homework. (This despite the fact that I remember getting in a few physical altercations -- my theories: 1) nobody in charge saw anything, 2) nobody in charge felt compelled to report anything back in the dark ages when I was in grade school, or 3) nobody felt compelled to report anything because why would they report a boy and girl fighting if the girl didn't lose?)

The nephew, on the other hand, hasn't managed to make it through first grade before getting his first "green card", a really poorly-named infraction notification sent home for his parents to sign. It sounds like it was named by a teacher who was into the whole self-esteem thing. Or someone who had no children involved in the immigration system.

Anyhow, if he wants to continue his life of violence, he should probably pack on a few pounds since I'm sure even his shorter classmates outweigh him. On second thought, with his coordination, he should probably just learn to run faster than everyone else. But that would require effort.

I'm going to start calling him Bruiser.

Or Possibly, Just Call Me A Tree Falling In A Forest With Neighbors Who Were Out Of State For Thanksgiving

2011-11-27T22:53:00.001-08:00

Yeah, so it turns out that my avoidance of my neighbors might have been completely unnecessary because Friday morning I saw them drive up and unload a bunch of luggage from their car.

It was a lot easier to keep track of them when they still had the senile old dog, because every time they left her alone she would wander around outside and bark. Sure it was occasionally a little annoying, but I figure I had no right to complain on that score since the only difference was that my senile old dog did all of her barking indoors.

Anyhow, now I feel slighted that they left town for Thanksgiving and didn't even think about the fact that I might have been counting on them to invite me for dinner.

The world today... You just can't count on anyone any more.

Just Call Me Ninja...

2011-11-24T21:13:00.000-08:00

Happy Thankshiding

2011-11-20T23:20:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's almost Thanksgiving again, which means that I only need to avoid my neighbors for three more days. As the saying goes, praise the Lord and pass the butter.

It's not that I don't like my neighbors -- I actually like them quite a bit, and they have a comfortable couch, which is something I'm sorely lacking. I've even forgiven them for the whole Uncle Walter thing, especially since there's no danger of a repeat seating chart land mine. It's just that I like lazing around my own house even more, and my attempts at polite conversation are getting worse and worse as time goes on. Also, Thanksgiving is a weird holiday for vegetarians when not eating with other vegetarians. (Even when eating with "almost a vegetarian" folks.)

So, yes, this year my plan is to again hang out in my house and eat a bunch of French onion soup (with melted cheese, of course) while lounging in my sweats. The only thing that could possibly go wrong is a chance encounter with my neighbors before Thursday. I know they only invite me because they think it is sad that I'm alone for the holidays, so really, I'm doing them a favor by walking the dogs at odd hours. If I could actually get my gate open I'd park in the driveway behind my house instead of in front of it for the next few days. Maybe I should just leave the lights off outside for the duration, just to be safe.

So anyhow, wish me luck in my skulking, and enjoy the gluttony of the day.

Trying To Do My Part...

2011-11-17T22:54:00.000-08:00

I walked downtown last Sunday with the express purpose of spending money, which felt a little odd, but my reasoning was that I'm always talking about how the downtown area has so many vacancies and I rarely spend money to support it.

For those keeping score, the nutritional quackery store closed a few weeks ago, and Dee's (which replaced Jim's Store) went out of business in less than six months. However, one of the restaurants that went out of business is being renovated and is opening up soon, and there's another gourmet hamburger place that recently opened.

Anyhow, the next time I feel the need to implement my own personal stimulus plan, I should probably not pick Sunday. Almost everything is closed on Sundays. I really ought to know this after living here for almost a decade. But the Western wear shop was open and I now know where to buy all of my camouflage clothing. (I did buy a thermal shirt there, so mission accomplished.)

I considered buying a skateboard, but decided that I didn't need to get that crazy. The mini pet supply store was open and I could have bought multiple Halloween costumes for the little dog, but I decided I would rather just give the shop money to stay open rather than buy clothing for my dogs. I did buy another set of clippers (since I think I permanently loaned the last pair to someone) so I could clip the big dog. I'll be sure to take before and after photos. How bad can it be?

Maybe next time I'll just get drunk in The Stag.

Repercussions

2011-11-13T21:39:00.000-08:00

Do you want to know what happens when you make fun of your boss and his mumbling on your blog? You get voice mail like this:

Program. Also, for apartment. Eating. Hello, the time, watch out. For more of it, try track track. It is Good luck with that. Bye, bye. 5.

That's just about what he said, too.

What is seen cannot be unseen...

2011-11-10T22:57:00.001-08:00

Apparently all good things must come to an end, and Darth Vader has finally been taken off the lawn.

However, in the days preceding his departure, his cape was blown out and it stuck to nearby branches, just as if he was holding open a short black trench coat.

You've never seen a flasher until you've seen short chunky Darth Vader flasher.

Luke, I Am Your Blubber

2011-11-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

I live in a town where people tend to decorate their houses for the holidays. Christmas is always the biggest season, of course, to the point that I saw one lawn with three (indoor-only) power strips chained together in order to power all of the blinking crap covering the grass. During the rainy season. It's a wonder more things don't burn down around here.

Halloween is another big decorating holiday. Pretty much everyone has a few pumpkins by the front door, but some people spend a little more time and effort. And while most of the decorations were down by Wednesday evening (thanks, in part, to the winds that kicked up), some people seem to be going for multi-holiday decorations.

It would be hard to justify keeping ghosts hanging for Thanksgiving, but there are some more non-traditional items that don't exactly scream Halloween. I'm thinking of one particular house which still has a Darth Vader dummy on the front lawn.

I'm not really sure what Darth Vader has to do with Halloween, so I suppose he could be just as relevant for Thanksgiving. I mean, Thanksgiving is about family, right, and why not have an icon who is best known for reconciling with his son?

The best part about the Darth Vader dummy is that the helmet was clearly bought at a store, along with the cape, but the rest of the body was assembled at home. His torso looks okay, with a black shirt, but his legs were made from stuffing black tights. The problem is that the tights were obviously made for a woman's figure, and he's a little overstuffed, so he's got big hips and chunky thighs. Every time I pass the house I think "Wow, Darth's really let himself go."

I'm sure these people wonder why I giggle every time I pass their house.

Technology is mumble mumble mumble

2011-11-03T21:25:00.000-07:00

I recently set up a Google voice account because... well, it's free, I can screen my calls, I don't have to give out my home phone number to people at work, it doesn't require me to turn my two decades old answering machine on, and it just seemed like a good idea.

Overall it has worked out pretty well. The call quality is usually pretty good and aside from the really poorly thought-out Google voice interface, it's easy to use.

One of the things it offers is a transcription of voice mail. This is the first transcription I got:

"Hey Theresa, it's Ashraf, it's about 140. Gimme a call me when you have a chance wanted to ask you if We send revenue assurance and activation notice for L T E Not sure if they're included in the email distribution. I have someone suggesting that they are getting emails but I don't have any requirements on thinking maybe that was something about it later on. I'll send you an email so maybe you don't have to call me back and just like that alright. Talk to you later. Bye."

This is so close to what Ashraf actually said, I was really impressed. It got acronyms and some uncommon words (revenue assurance). Aside from a few odd punctuation choices, it's almost perfect.

However, Ashraf speaks pretty clearly without a discernible accent. The next call I got was from a developer who doesn't speak English as a first language and tends to speak very quietly.

Hi. This is a good morning, this is called Georgie end of this team. I just want to call you regarding the The made which I could try getting paid modification. The second decisions. Please. Call me when you get this and such. Bye.

(There's no Georgie working on the project.) I couldn't figure out what this was about, but after listening to the message I wasn't any better informed, so I'm giving Google a pass on this one.

So I was still pretty impressed. Then I got this call from Rvan:

The Thank you. Bye truest friend Al papers and and and you make out of the just calling. We have a Unit 3 E to talk about. Carlie, and just wanna make sure stuff alright with the call comments. Never mind with this price. Rich, email me, but otherwise we're doing okay bye bye.

(There's no Carlie or Al working on the project either.) This sounds very mysterious, with Unit 3 E and all, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't in the actual source.

So, yeah, Google voice. Apparently it only works really well for one person.

Otherwise I'm doing okay bye bye.

May the Luck O' the Pot Be With You!

2011-10-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

The annual Halloween potluck is tomorrow. For some reason (probably because Halloween is actually tomorrow) it was scheduled for a Monday instead of Friday, so I have no excuse to avoid it. What does it mean when I spend 40% of my week working from home and still seek excuses to avoid my coworkers? Actually, it just means that I have no idea who half the people are, I'm actively trying to avoid another quarter, and the remainder I see three days a week anyhow.

I'm making what turns out to be a 1950's casserole stuffed into a pumpkin. Or three little pumpkins in this case, since it proved difficult to buy one large pumpkin the day before Halloween. But other than that it has all of the traditional ingredients: cream of mushroom soup, mayonnaise, and Cheddar cheese. Healthy? Not a chance. I only hope it's at least edible. Not because I care about the potluck, but because I'll be eating the remainder for the rest of the week.

At least I haven't resorted to the ultimate potluck snub, the "Vienna franks in lime Jello" masterpiece.

Maybe next year...

Under Siege

2011-10-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

It is once again birthday time for my (nearly) seven year old nephew, so of course that means it was time for Jeff and me to create a birthday cake.

First the excuses:

The birthday boy wanted something from Star Craft. Yes, a video game. And not even the current Star Craft. Jeff doesn't have the hardware to play anything released within the past five years, so this is the original game.

We all know how much I like video games.

I have to admit -- I wasn't feeling very inspired. At first I was thinking that it was because we were creating a cake based on a thing that didn't exist, unlike the Kraken and the Storm Trooper. Then I thought about that statement and laughed.

Also, we decided not to mess with fondant this year because it's a pain to work with and tastes pretty gross. It turns out that frosting is also a pain to work with and tastes pretty nasty too. And it looks worse. I think next year we may have to switch back.

So, given all that, here is the "Terran Siege Tank".

Yeah, it's a little underwhelming. Oh well. The birthday boy was pleased that he could put red candles in the gun barrels "just like it's firing".

That's A Compliment, Right?

2011-10-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

I went to what used to be the Pot Belly Deli this week for lunch. It changed names about ten years ago, but I prefer the horribly inappropriate old name to the new bland "Deli Delight". The food hasn't changed in fifteen years.

So while my sandwich was being made, Victor, who hadn't heard me order, looked up, said hello, then asked "Vegetarian Delight?"

Apparently I'm a little predictable, but there are exactly three vegetarian options on the menu: one has cream cheese (which I don't really like in a sandwich), one has olives (devil's donkey droppings), and the third has cheese. You can't really go wrong with cheese unless it's one of those stinky expensive kinds which this isn't.

I tried to make a joke about it by responding "It's almost like I always order the same thing or something."

That's when Victor looked at me and said "You're an engineer, aren't you?"

Totally a compliment. It has to be.

The Action and Adventure Never Stop

2011-10-02T22:40:00.000-07:00

As usual, I was going to get a bunch of things done this weekend, but, also as usual, I didn't really do any of them. I did mow my lawn and tossed a chicken over the fence. (That last bit isn't a euphemism for anything -- one of my neighbors' chickens was in my back yard when I went out to mow the lawn, and I'm not sure what the dogs would do with a chicken, so I helped her back over into her yard.)

I also watched the movie "Hanna" which had some good acting but a storyline that wasn't all that well thought out. Then I watched the movie "Blitz" with Jason Statham which actually had a better plot, something I really hadn't expected from an action film. What is this world coming to?

I also watched the pilot of "Xena: Princess Warrior" which was actually pretty good for what it was. I'd never seen any Xena episodes, just read the odd comment about the show and heard a few people talking about it. My main impressions: that "ayiyiyiyi" thing sounded different than I expected it to, and the whole Xena-Gabriella relationship wasn't so much a subtext as just plain text (ie, rot26 encrypted for the old-school geeks among you). There's no way that was unintentional.

I didn't actually talk to anyone for two days. (To borrow a line from the show "In Plain Sight": "Best two days of my life.")

So there you have it. My weekend in a nutshell. I look forward to spending many more like it.

URGENT! You might be an idiot!

2011-09-25T21:57:00.000-07:00

One of the important things that you learn when you study probability theory is that if something is truly random, you will get clusters of events. I'm trying to believe that's the cause for the three "drop everything, oh my god, this is totally wrong" reports that I received in two days that turned out to be not only user error, but user error that makes me find it hard to believe that these people can actually tie their shoes in the morning. The other possibility is that our users actually are getting dumber and I can't contemplate that thought for long.

Imagine that you get an email with the subject of "URGENT!!!: kittens no longer waking up since the last release, must fix IMMEDIATELY" and when you finally wade through the bug tracking system to find the attached screen snapshots, the "before" picture shows five kittens playing, and the "after" picture shows an alligator basking. With a date stamp on the picture that shows it was taken five years ago.

Anyhow, after the third such email on Friday, I sent Rvan mail indicating that our users were idiots. I also included some profanity, but in a completely professional way (ie, I abbreviated it all). Then I said I was going to take a nap, which I did.

The good news is that Rvan is pure of thought and deed because he didn't immediately understand my abbreviated profanity. The bad news is that he is tenacious, so he spent the time to figure it out.

Anyhow, I'm hoping that the stupidity cluster has passed us by again. If only I'd learned something in my stochastic processes class, I might be able to figure out if I should just stay home for another week...

We All Belong Somewhere

2011-09-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

In place of the regular Thursday post, I offer this conversation between my brother and his soon-to-be seven year-old son which deserves to be immortalized:

[last night, sun setting]

Son: Dad, can I join the boy scouts?

Jeff: Sure. But I thought you didn't want to.

Son: Oh yeah, right. How about the girl scouts?

Jeff: [pause] Um, sure. We might have to ask about that.

Son: Oh, never mind.

Let me check on that...

2011-09-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

The dogs went to the groomer's on Friday (Molly because she was stinky and had knots in her hair, and Ginger because it's easier to pay for her to go to the groomer than to deal with the fallout from taking Molly in the car and leaving Ginger at home). However, the groomer doesn't take credit cards so I had to write a check.

A check. Who doesn't take credit cards? I hadn't written a check in about six months and it was another four months for the previous one. I had to go back out to my car to even find my checkbook. Then I had to remember how to fill the check out. I type almost everything these days, and when I do write things down the end of the word tends to trail off because I know what it says and nobody else needs to read it. (I get flack at work for my pages of checklists, but really, how else am I supposed to get a sense of accomplishment? Writing a new method? No. Marking an X in a box on my list? Yes.) I had to consciously finish the end of every word while I was writing the dollar amount.

Anyhow, Molly now looks about ten years younger with a goofy puppy cut, and Ginger is prancing around like the princess she is.

Next time I should probably just bring cash.

Who are you again?

2011-09-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

My contracting pimp came by work again today. Naturally my cubicle neighbor Jon and I were discussing the results of our card game at the time. I often wonder what the people who do my payroll think when they come by in their suits and professional attitudes and I'm slouched in my chair wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and tennis shoes talking about something completely unrelated to work.

On the other hand, I don't wonder that very often because for some reason I seem to be completely unable to remember anything about my contracting people the minute they leave the building. It's become the standard joke for Rvan to quiz me on the name of the person I just talked to. (There were only two of them before today.) I see the main agent about once every two months and at least five times in the past three years I've assumed he was someone else. Luckily I never use anyone's name, so he may not have noticed.

Oddly enough I find his voice very easy to recognize, so if I hear him talking to someone else before I see him, I'm sure to pass the pop quiz later on. I used to be able to remember faces really well, but at some point in the past twenty years I reallocated that brain space for something else, presumably something really important such as the words to Britney Spears songs. (Jon started quoting "Oops I did it again" today.)

Anyhow, now there's some woman named Taylor working for them which means that the people I have to remember has increased by 50%.

I'm doomed.

The Old Shiny Shoe

2011-09-11T23:41:00.000-07:00

The great thing about shopping for shoes on the internet is that you don't have to go to shoe stores. I actually used to sell shoes, so believe me when I say I really hate shoe stores. Unless you have a foot fetish or (possibly) completed a veterinary dentistry residency at Davis, buying shoes is something to be avoided at all costs. (Or, put more plainly, sane people don't like to buy shoes.)

Anyhow, the only bad part about shopping for shoes on the internet is that sometimes things don't look exactly how you picture them. Case in point, my new shoes.

Yes, I somehow bought shoes that look like I should be strolling on the starship deck in a silver metallic bodysuit in a 80's sci-fi movie (except they don't have heels because they are "performance" shoes, whatever that means).

Yes, I could have sent them back when I opened the box. But everyone in the entire world knows I'm way too lazy to do that.

Instead I'm wearing them to walk the dogs and mow the lawn. I feel like Glinda the Good, except that she was, you know, polite and stuff. I'm more like the troll that lives under the bridge. In sparkly shoes.

Anyhow, these shoes are so obnoxious that I'm starting to actually like them.

I may order a second pair in purple...

I Don't

2011-09-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

To keep my mind off the fact that I might have to buy a new car this week since my transmission went on the equivalent of a three day bender down to Tijuana, I will give you the real reason that I remain unmarried:

Back when I was seven years old I went to a real elementary school, the kind that had playground equipment that could kill you. I have a few scars from childhood, mostly from deep knee wounds that had so much dirt ground into them that they were guaranteed to be infected, but on this occasion, I was on a see-saw with a supposed friend. This see-saw was one long plank of wood with handles on either end, and it went all the way down to the ground. Ideally the person on each end would slow their descent with their legs, but on this occasion the other person just let it plummet until it hit the ground and rebounded.

This acted a bit like a trebuchet, with me as the bucket of rocks. I went up into the air and led with my chin as I landed on the plank.

I learned a few things that day -- the physics of a parabolic arc are not to be denied, wounds anywhere on the head bleed a lot, and many people aren't good with blood. My hemorrhaging chin didn't bother me all that much (since I couldn't see it) and I didn't realize that I was even injured until the people around me told me I had to go to the nurse's office.

My mom was called to pick me up and I got some stitches in my chin, the thought of which bothered me much more than the wound ever did which is why in my school picture for the year I'm wearing a gigantic band-aid even though everyone tried to convince me to take it off for the picture.

Anyhow, the point of this story is that my grandmother visited us that year, looked at my chin, and assured me that the scar would be gone by the time I got married.

Reassurance, blessing, or curse? I'll let you decide. In any case, I still have a scar on my chin, and I'm still not married. Those old German women knew a thing or two...

That's Not Hot

2011-09-01T23:52:00.001-07:00

Here is the main difference between working at home and working in the office (ignoring for the moment the commute, number of animals, and network lag time):

At home I know it is hot outside because it gets hot inside. In the office, I know it is hot outside because I have to put on a sweatshirt to stay comfortable.

Yes, we have paradoxical climate control in the office. The hotter it is outside, the more I'm clutching hot drinks to keep my hands from aching. Every once in a while the building management tries to fix it, but really, either the people near the windows can boil, or the people on the inside of the building can freeze. There isn't any way to make everyone happy.

I have an inside cubicle in the office, which is fine because I have a window at home. (Also, who wants a view of the parking lot?) Until last week it seemed like everyone around me was moving away. I was starting to wonder if I was the human equivalent of the heart attack bench. (When Eric was a manager, three people who sat in one spot died from heart attacks, and nobody would sit there any more. The group finally moved to another building.)

Now Rvan has hired the two quietest people in the universe to sit near me. Those poor guys. The only consolation is that I'm not there at least two days a week. We'll see how long it takes before they move to the other side of the building.

Geographically Challenged

2011-08-28T23:35:00.000-07:00

While driving down to San Mateo (which, it turns out, is to the south of San Francisco) to visit K-poo a few weeks ago, I drove on a portion of the 80 that I hadn't driven on before. I expected to eventually cross the Bay Bridge to San Francisco -- when I saw a bridge in the distance my first thought was "Hey, I made better time than expected." And then my second thought was "That's not the Bay Bridge". Then I crossed over the short bridge and had no idea what bridge I had just crossed.

That, in a nutshell, has always been my approach to geography. I've lived in or near the SF Bay Area for about fifteen years, and I managed not to realize that SF was on a peninsula for at least the first ten of those. I grew up in Orange County and only know two freeways there. I'd be hard pressed to identify more than half the states on a US map. (To be fair, though, there's no point to all those little states on the east coast, and I don't feel bad about that.) At one point in high school I had memorized all the countries in Africa, but I think at least fifteen of them have changed names since then, so what little knowledge I had is still wrong. (Burkina Faso? Really?)

It's not that I have a bad sense of direction -- even if I take a wrong turn, I can usually figure out how to head back to where I'm trying to go. I just don't know anything about where I am when I get there.

I know that Tahoe is at a higher elevation because that was used as an example in my respiratory physiology class (and the point of the question was to prove why you shouldn't take a dog in heart failure with you to high elevations), but I don't actually have any real idea of where Tahoe is, and I couldn't name the mountain range it's on. Also, I'm pretty sure, but not positive, that I live within a few hours of Tahoe.

So pretty much my grasp of where things are is limited to the following:
1) Is it my house?
2) If it's not my house, have I walked there before?
3) If I haven't walked there before, have I driven myself there within the last two years?

If the answer to all of those is no, it may as well be in Ouagadougou.

Can I keep a secret or what?

2011-08-25T22:01:00.000-07:00

While looking for early evidence of my photographic failures, I came across this little gem:

(The title "My Daily Diary" is a lie. It reads somewhat like most of the blogs that you get if you hit the random button on blogspot -- most entries start with an exclamation of how long it had been since the last entry and then conclude that there isn't anything to talk about. It stops completely on page ten.)

6/11/80

Tonight is graduation night for the 8th graders [edit: Eric & Jeff were in 8th grade at the time, I was in 6th, and Mike would have been a sophomore in high school] so Mom, Dad, Eric, and Jeff went to the Arches for dinner. [edit: The Arches was the default nice restaurant for special occasions. I never actually went there.] Shortly after they left Mike told me he was going out to eat pizza and that he would be home before Mom and Dad got home. Well, he did. He walked in the door and said, "I'm asleep in bed." I was doing the dishes at the time so I washed off my hands and went back to his room. He started putting things under the blankets in his bed so Mom and Dad would think it was him if they glanced in the room. I asked him where he was going and he said bowling...

Looking back on this, I can only believe that there is no way in heck my parents didn't know what was going on after they got back, because I kept repeating that Mike had gone to bed without being prompted. I've always been the world's worst liar. Oh well. He turned out to be a productive member of society, and I'm sure his daughters would never, ever do anything like this...

All's Fair...

2011-08-21T22:25:00.000-07:00

The Yolo County Fair was held this weekend. I'm still recovering from the crud I ate at the fair last year, so I didn't go this year, and as a consequence I don't feel like vomiting this year. See, you really can teach an old dog new tricks. (Not my actual old dog, mind you -- she's still tearing up paper plates into little tiny pieces because she can't turn them over -- but the metaphorical old dog, yes.)

Last year I was astonished at how closely my contest choices lined up with ribbons on quilts until I realized that pretty much everything in the entire building had a ribbon on it. I had even threatened to create a quilt and enter it this year to see if there was any way to not win a ribbon.

This year one of my friends entered a photo and won a blue ribbon.

Now, I am in no way saying that his photo didn't deserve to win a top prize in the competition. For all I know his picture is of Ansel Adams quality. True, it's a picture of a baseball diamond, which means that the subject is a little lacking in my book, but I realize not everyone feels this way. But my point here is not the quality of his photo, but the fact that I may have found something that I am even more unqualified to do or judge than quilting.

Back when I was in college the first time, I didn't have an inkling of how bad a photographer I was. Then I took a photography class. In that class I found out that a) I couldn't compose a picture, b) I couldn't get the exposure correct, ever, and c) I couldn't focus the camera if my life depended on it. It's a good thing this wasn't a required course or I'd still be trying to graduate (for the first time).

Because this was back in the dark ages, we developed our own black and white film and printed it. That didn't help things either. My prints were always distinguishable by the fingerprints all over them. Everyone else was doing fancy dodging techniques and experimenting with different sepia tones, and I was trying not to crumple the film into a little ball while getting it out of the canister. The instructor kept looking at my stuff and moving on without making any comment at all.

Anyhow, the point here is not that I suck as a photographer, it's that I realize I suck as a photographer only because someone pointed it out to me. I would have gone through my entire life not realizing how bad I was if I hadn't taken that class. And the thing is -- I still don't understand what makes one photograph better than another. It's like this whole area of my brain is just completely missing. If something has pretty colors and is more or less in focus, hey, looks good to me!

So anyways, congratulations to my friend Keith on his winning entry. Despite the fact that it's a picture of a baseball diamond, the photo has pretty colors and is in focus. I can't ask for more than that.

Sounds like...

2011-08-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

Another snippet from work:

Present at this time: Ngoc (who previously believed Rvan when he told her married women don't wear heels), JLo (not mentioned on the blog before now -- the funniest thing I can say is that his wife gave him a bottle of a Rogaine knock-off for a present), Jeff, and me. All of us are in our cubicles except JLo who is standing in Ngoc's cube.

Ngoc: (some conversation I didn't hear) "... and what is that called, when you can't remember the words?"
Jeff (mumbling): "Alzheimer's"
Ngoc: "Is it Parkinson's? When you can't remember the words."
Me: "Aphasia?"
Jeff (louder): "Alzheimer's"
Ngoc, JLo (together): "What?"
Jeff: "It's when you can't hear what people are saying."
Ngoc, JLo, me: "What?"
Jeff: "Alzheimer's"
Ngoc: "Oh, Alzheimer's. I always confuse that with Parkinson's. That's like this..."
Me: "Is Ngoc doing Charades of Parkinson's Disease back there?"
Ngoc: "What is Charades?"

And on it goes...

(Amazingly enough, I was super-productive at work today -- despite, or maybe because of, stuff like this.)

Challenged

2011-08-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

Before I start this, I'd just like to acknowledge that this post really needs a picture, but I just can't do it.

There is a house within a stone's throw of mine that sat vacant for the first eight years I lived in Woodland. Yes, that was during the time that housing prices just kept rising. (Also during the time that prices fell back down again.) The first real sign of economic recovery I believe in was the fact that this house sold last year.

I have no idea what this house looks like on the inside, but in a neighborhood filled with Victorians and Craftsman houses, it looks like a 1970's duplex even though it's just a single family dwelling. The 70's had many things going for it (disco! bean bag chairs! lawn darts!), but it was a low point for architecture and if even I notice that sort of thing you know it must be bad.

So, essentially this was an ugly house to begin with (although it does have a pool, of which I am mildly covetous).

Then a few weeks ago they painted it. Normally that would be a good thing, but there are two problems:
1) The color is a bilious green. It's really, really hideous.
2) To compound the color problem, they painted the whole house one color. The walls, the trim, the front door, the garage door, the fence, everything.

So yeah, it looks like the 70's vomited up something in my neighborhood.

On the other hand, sure, it's ugly, but it lowers the bar and I don't feel so bad about my lawn.

Take Me Away!

2011-08-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

Because all I've done is work lately, here's the funniest thing that I've been around all week:

A couple of evenings ago Eric and Scrawny Mike were still at work as they often are. Both of them are known for being able to talk at great length on subjects they know little about, and Scrawny Mike has the added bonus of liking to argue, to the point that he will change his opinion just so he can be on the opposite side.

So there they were, standing in my cubicle, discussing whether or not women like to take baths.

As the sole possessor of two X chromosomes in the building at the time, I tried to inject some actual facts into the conversation by giving the opinion of an actual woman (me), namely: 1) who has time for that?, 2) Even if I had time, why would I want to marinate in dirty water?, and 3) the whole "women taking baths" concept is a mirage created by advertising in order to sell Calgon.

Scrawny Mike and Eric, however, declined to register my input because (and I'm actually quoting here) I'm "not the target demographic". So instead they argued about it for another fifteen minutes until they got sidetracked on Star Trek actor information.

At least they weren't talking about video games.

A Splash Of Color

2011-07-31T22:26:00.000-07:00

About a month ago I started trying to let my right brain out to play once a day by drawing and painting. Sometimes the results have impressed me. Sometimes I just laugh and see if maybe adding more purple will solve the problem. (The answer is: no, no amount of additional paint will fix most problems.)

(Just add more paint. Keep adding...)

My original supplies consisted of 1) a sketchbook for "dry media", 2) watercolor pencils, 3) "manga" pens, and 4) the cheapest brushes I could find.

Technically watercolor is not really a dry media, so I guess it's not too surprising that the paper gets wavy when I add enough water to the watercolor pencils. The brushes tend to shed bristles like they're in a pre-Rogaine advertisement, and I'm not sure what makes the pens "manga", but I guess they draw overly-large eyes well. After weeks of attempting to find a light source in my house that would allow me to photograph the final product without adding a yellow hue, I finally dragged my old scanner out of the closet and hooked it up. (That also solved part of the wavy paper problem.)

(Helpful hint: it's best to remove all the cat hair from the glass before scanning...)

I decided to increase my investment over the weekend and I bought some actual watercolor paints. Unlike the watercolor paints of my youth which came in multicolored cakes that never went bad, these come in tubes. It's going to take some adjusting. I have to remind myself that watercolors should not be applied with a trowel.

The biggest problem I've had (aside from facial symmetry, which I just can't do at all) is coming up with something to draw.

(Is it really that hard to remove all the cat hair before scanning? Yes. Yes it is.)

It's almost like writing a blog or something.

Supp-what?

2011-07-28T22:46:00.000-07:00

(Judgmental walrus is judging you)

About twelve years ago, our productivity at work was immensely enhanced by the Y2k hysteria when it was determined that the project to certify all of the internal applications "y2k-ready" was the perfect dumping ground for all the useless employees. The best part was that we didn't have to take them back afterward.

Jump forward ten years and there was no longer a ready-made group for shuffling the chaff out of sight. But once one person was successfully unloaded on another group, all the other managers poked their heads out of their offices and followed suit. Unfortunately that meant that the support group became the equivalent of a nuclear dump site. Sure there are a few competent people trying to keep things going, but there are also a lot of leaky barrels.

For example, every time we do a release, I write up a page of instructions. I number the tasks. I try not to put too many words on the page. Usually it's almost identical to the instruction sheet from the last release. Then I send it off to the support group where it is translated into some other universe.

How do you improve things when step four is run three times in a row, and step six is skipped entirely? There are only eight steps. And this problem with numbers has happened two releases in a row.

I just can't...

That Bastard!

2011-07-24T21:34:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about living alone is that if I put something somewhere, it will stay there (unless it's something that Ripley likes to drag around the house). The bad part of that is that if I can't find something, I have only myself to blame.

Take today, for example. I was cleaning up the back of the house and needed the dust pan, so I came out to the living room and failed to find it in its usual spot on top of the big dog crate. I didn't panic right away since (I have to admit) I sometimes don't put things away. Also, I have a tendency not to spot things that are right in front of me.

However, after about ten minutes of circling around the house and carefully looking in every nook and cranny, it finally dawned on me: clearly some bastard had broken into my house and taken the dustpan.

At this point my brain was split. One part (we'll call it the rational part) knew that that scenario was pretty unlikely. I mean, it's a nice dustpan, but it's still a dustpan. And surely if someone bothered to break into the house and get past Ginger the wonder dog, they would take my Mac, which is actually worth something. And possibly my work laptop, which is almost in its dinosaur years, but would probably still be stolen in the event of a real burglary.

The other part of me (which I fully expect to wrest control from rational me by the time I hit 80) was trying to decide whether it was worth calling the cops about the scumbag who had broken into my house.

My brain was still battling it out when I saw the dustpan where it had fallen behind the dog crate.

I'm blaming this one on the cats.

Some People Just Don't Get It

2011-07-21T21:38:00.001-07:00

So I'm at work this evening, and Scrawny Mike is describing his latest illness/food poisoning to another coworker in enough detail that I can't actually pay attention to what I'm supposed to be doing. And the whole time I'm thinking "well, at least he's not talking about video games".

You see where this is going.

Things started to take a downturn when he said "Yesterday I felt so bad I couldn't even play games."

At that point I was still hoping he might get distracted and talk at greater length about how his vomiting woke up the entire household, but no...

"Actually, I was playing Portal when I first got sick."

And then, the person he was talking to asked what level he was on and it was all over.

I give up.

The Tastes They Are A-Changin'

2011-07-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about having a garden is the ability to walk outside and graze. This, of course, works best if you plant things that you like. And that, of course, depends on your tastes being the same when the crops come in as they were when you planted them.

For some reason this year that seems to be a problem. Either my tomatoes really are terrible this year, or I just don't like cherry tomatoes any more. Broccoli (which I didn't plant but I do get in my veggie box) is another thing I used to like and now I can't eat it. The bush beans just taste very blah.

So what does that leave me with? The three strawberries that weren't eaten by the bugs were pretty good. The tomatillos aren't ripe yet, but early indicators are that I'll have quite a few of them. I have a lot more onions than any one person can eat, but luckily I can harvest those as needed. The lemon cucumbers are taking their own sweet time (which is probably because I planted them from seed rather late in the year). I have one (and only one) carrot that is about 1/2" in diameter but appears to extend down about two feet.

And other than that: okra. I have something like five okra plants and they're all doing pretty well. So far I've roasted okra, and added chopped okra to my pizza. I'll probably be currying okra soon. The odd thing is that I've never had much okra in the past, but it's one of the few things from my garden that I'm liking this year.

It's a good thing I don't depend on my garden to feed me the rest of the year...

Project Yourself

2011-07-14T22:33:00.000-07:00

Back when I was in college (the first time) I had a roommate who worked part time at a group home for adults with Down Syndrome. Many of the clients had lived in group homes or institutions for most of their lives, and as with any group housing situation, often the behaviors learned were not ideal. One of the things that many of the residents could do was projectile vomit on demand. (My roommate had a great story about a new employee who had barricaded herself in the kitchen with the doorway completely covered except for a six inch gap at the top, whereupon one of the residents kept jumping into the air and vomiting into the gap. Fun times, fun times.)

Anyhow, I bring this up because it occurs to me (yet again) that this may be the only way to keep some people from carrying on with long boring conversations around me. In a quid pro quo type way, if you yack near me I may yak on you.

This pertains especially to conversations about computer games, but endless details about bicycle races may also qualify. Using a conservative estimate, I have been forced to listen to at least three hours worth of conversation/monologues on the two subjects this week. I'd prefer to listen to someone scrape their fingernails down a chalkboard.

So, take heed. You have been warned.

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

2011-07-10T21:35:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about walking the dogs every morning is the chance to feel more connected to the neighborhood. I see the same people on a daily or weekly basis, and this being Woodland, people say good morning when they pass, whether they know you or not. (I did this once in Orange County and got a strange look.)

Here are the people I see in my neighborhood:

The older (than me) guy on Lawson who details his cars every weekend. One of the cars is a Civic -- it's nice to know what my car would look like if it were clean.

The bartenders at The Stag. (I'm assuming that they're the bartenders. I'd like to believe that not even the hardcore drinkers are at The Stag every single morning. Besides, I've seen them emptying mop buckets.) I sometimes return wayward pint glasses when I go by.

The owner of Emil's Shoe Repair. When he's cleaning out in front of the store, he's nice enough to turn off the leaf blower when we go by so Ginger doesn't have a heart attack.

The barber at Top Hat Barber. He's on vacation until next week, so the shop is closed right now. Normally there's one ancient guy sitting in the chair, with the big screen television on at full volume in front. Sometimes they close for funerals, too.

The guy at the holistic supplements store. We wave to each other every time I pass by during store hours and I try hard not to roll my eyes at the contents of the store.

The guy who owns Denny Design. I see him quite a bit since he's restoring the exterior of his part of downtown back to its original 1890s glory on the weekends, and he's always willing to take a couple of minutes to explain what he's doing. This morning he was applying gold leaf (I kid you not) to one of the columns. He's disappointed that the restaurant two addresses away was recently painted "like a wedding cake". According to him, "pastels are nice, but they didn't use pastels in the 1890s".

So there you have it. My morning walk.

Cock-a-doodle-croak

2011-07-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

One of the first emergencies I saw during my residency was a pet rooster. At about four PM the receptionist called down to let me know that the owner was on her way with a sick rooster. The woman was driving from Manteca (roughly 90 minutes from the hospital) and would be there as soon as she could.

The owner, an 80+ year old woman, finally showed up at around 11 PM with a moribund rooster named Jaques (or something like that -- it's been a few years). She said that it had taken her so long because she "kept checking to make sure Jaques was still alive". (Remember that, it's important.)

The rooster was just barely breathing. He was dehydrated and had a grossly distended crop and his breath smelled like something was fermenting. Getting any sort of accurate history from the owner was impossible. The only information I was really able to elicit was 1) the rooster was quite old, 2) he had been sick for at least a few days, which was why 3) she was treating him with leftover dog/cat/rabbit/people "medicine" (she didn't know what all she had used) ground up and mixed in with his feed.

I hid my disbelief face under my caring frown, told her that the bird was probably not going to make it ("I'm very concerned") but I'd give it my best shot, made her sign an estimate, and sent her on her way to go 20 mph down the busy freeway.

That late at night it was just me plus the senior student (not someone who knew anything about birds) and the rooster. We got everything ready to give fluids and suck the distillery contents from the bird's crop, but the minute I touched the rooster it went limp. As in, it stopped breathing and fell over, eyes open, no pulse.

I looked up at the student and found her staring at me with wide eyes. Things like that didn't usually happen on other services. (Things like that often happened on the exotics service, but I was still trying to pretend that I had some handle on things in front of the student.)

I grabbed the crash cart, intubated the rooster, and gave it a few breaths. I might have even given it a dose of epinephrine. Naturally it responded in the same manner as the rest of my CPR candidates. In the words of one of the ER clinicians, if you can't keep them alive in the first place, it's hard to make them alive again after they're dead.

I called the owner on her cell phone and told her the news and she agreed to have a necropsy done.

There was cancer filling everything that could be filled with cancer. The crop didn't empty because there was no gut left for it to empty into. This definitely was not something that could have been treated successfully. I left a voice mail for the owner telling her the results and forgot about it.

About six months later, I heard from one of my advisors (who worked one day a week in a clinic near Manteca) that she had treated one of this woman's other pets. While they were talking, the woman told her that she had taking Jaques to the university hospital and that I had told her that he died, but she wasn't sure that was true because he "hadn't seemed that sick" and she thought I might have just taken him.

And people ask me why I don't practice any more...

The Doggone Truth

2011-07-03T23:28:00.000-07:00

Molly Speedbump, the geriatric deaf dog, has been with me now for slightly more than a year. In that time she has figured out how to climb on the bed, dig up rawhides that Lucy the elderly blind dog buried in the back yard years ago, and pee near, if not always on, the puppy pads spread on the game room floor for that purpose.

Taking Ginger and Molly for a walk in the morning is an exercise in planning and patience. Ginger gets so excited when it's time to go that she bounds in the air trying to lick my face, which makes getting her harness on somewhat challenging. She has yet to give me a black eye, but it's been a close thing a few times. Molly presents different challenges. She spins around on the hardwood floors when she's excited, and she hasn't gained any agility in the last twelve months. Lately I've been putting a boot on her tumor-leg foot since she tends to drag that foot when she gets tired. (Having a trail of blood lead to my front door is just not quite the done thing.) Putting a boot on the spinning dog while the other dog is jumping up to lick your face is just not easy, no matter what you do.

In any case, each day starts off with me adding multiple layers of duct tape to the boot, because otherwise it looks like this:

which doesn't really protect her toes that much.

So, yeah. That's me every morning, wiping dog spit off my face, trying to keep Ginger from attacking bigger dogs on leashes, and listening to the "whoosh, pause, whoosh, pause, whoosh, pause" of Molly scuffing her foot as she trots along with a big wad of duct tape on her foot.

Dogs are such great stress relievers.

Going, Going, Gone

2011-06-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

The first person of the current mini-Exodus had his last day on the project today, so we all went out to lunch together. As going away lunches go, this one wasn't too bad -- the restaurant was so loud that I couldn't hear the person across the table, but at least that precluded any good-bye speeches.

We ended up at the Panera that just opened up near work. I'm sure it will do well -- it has nothing spicy on the menu and everything can be eaten without really chewing, so the blue hair crowd will take over. I had the bread and cheese calorie bomb. (No, that doesn't really narrow it down since everything on the menu has bread and cheese and is at least 800 calories.)

It's a far cry from the old days when we had at least ten Indian contractors working on the original project. The company that imported the labor made the visas for either one or (optionally) two years, so it seemed like there was almost always somebody leaving. Since many people didn't drive to work, we usually ended up at the one restaurant with a lunch buffet within walking distance. The sign out front said "Spring Garden" but among our circles it was known as "Good-Bye Garden". Eventually the company stopped hiring people from that intermediary and Spring Garden went out of business.

Only two more group lunches to get through in the next few weeks...

You say tomato, I say that ain't coming off of there

2011-06-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

I often wonder "What is the Internet really good for?" (besides stalking your exes, reading celebrity gossip blogs, reading non-celebrity blogs, watching things on hulu.com, finding out which political candidates think God talks to them (and since when is hearing voices in your head not a sign of a mental disorder?), and ordering feral cat traps on-line).

The answer to this is clearly: recipes. Whereas before you had to page through multiple expensive cookbooks to find a recipe that looks great in the picture but turns out to taste terrible, now you can accomplish that much more easily. And it's free (aside from the $72 you spend on the spices that you'll never use again).

This week I had extra tomatoes in my CSA box. I'm not a big fan of anything but cherry tomatoes, and the beefsteak tomatoes that I had in my box were so ripe that they wouldn't even make the trip to work. But we've established that the one thing I have in abundance is sun. So I decided to make sun-dried tomatoes.

As with most new things that I try, I can't really blame my problems on anyone but me. It clearly says that Roma tomatoes are the best choice, and that the tomatoes shouldn't be overly-ripe, and that if you use something other than a Roma, you should probably remove the seeds. I ignored all of this advice, because really, are you going to believe everything you read on the Internet?

So I sliced tomato wedges, threw them on a cookie sheet with some salt, covered the whole thing in cheesecloth, put it outside on the patio, and forgot about it for four days.

The good news is that I have sun-dried tomatoes.

The bad news is that these suckers were welded to the pan. In fact, I had to soak the pan to get them off, which sort of negates the whole drying process. But the one piece that I pried off with a knife tasted like a sun-dried tomato.

So... next time I'll fail differently. That's all you can really ask for.

Beat the Heat

2011-06-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

We hit triple digits this week here in beautiful Woodland, which is pretty standard for this time of year. The tomatoes are loving it, the dogs not so much.

I haven't turned on the A/C yet, mostly because I hate trying to close the house up that much, and also because it seems easier to just acclimate to the heat than to keep going back and forth between cold and hot. So far so good, but I certainly reserve the right to change my mind about this.

While working at home, I'm pretty much stuck in the hottest part of the house, so I've been trying a variety of techniques to stay cool:

Drinking chilled drinks. This doesn't do much other than make me have to go to the bathroom constantly. However, that actually does help because the bathroom is one of the cooler spots in the house.

Letting 14 pounds of ice melt in a wading pool in my living room. I was doing this one mostly for the dogs -- I was hoping that it would keep the floor cool since they insist on being in the same room with me. It didn't really work, but I did find it entertaining the Guido the cat spent almost two hours watching the ice melt.

Evaporative cooling. If you really want to stay cool, this is the way to go. Get a t-shirt wet under the faucet, wring it out, put it on, and sit under the slowly spinning ceiling fan. This works so well, in fact, that I was actually cold when the room was under 90 degrees.

I also try not to use the oven, which sounds obvious, but one of the perks of being at home is being able to cook or bake something for lunch. I finally got smart and moved the toaster oven outside on the patio with an extension cord. That worked pretty well, but I'm toying with the idea of building a solar oven. If nothing else, it ought to be interesting.

Those Old Proverbs Lie

2011-06-19T23:11:00.000-07:00

First off, here is my apple tree. It has more apples than leaves, and the whole thing is only about three feet tall. It's a pretty pathetic excuse for a tree at this point, but it's trying hard to produce as much fruit as possible.

The winds kicked up a couple of nights ago, and I found this about ten feet away.

Sometimes the apples really do fall far from the tree.

Finally, never let it be said that there isn't much to be learned from the newspaper:

I'm not really sure what a "pimp bomb" is, but I have to imagine purple crushed velvet, tassels, and a fancy cane must be involved somehow...

There's No Good In Bye

2011-06-12T22:22:00.001-07:00

It's true, I missed my regularly scheduled Thursday posting, but JoJo the Enforcer sent me a picture of her new kid still covered in baby goo, and I had the vapors for three days. Or possibly I just didn't get home on Thursday until after midnight. Take your pick.

Anyhow, in the last couple of days it has suddenly decided to be summer and all of the kids got out of school. Normally my only contact with the school kids is tangential -- they drop homework on the street, and I laugh at their spelling, grammar, and content when I pick it up along with all of the other trash that gets stuck on my lawn.

Apparently the end of the school year brings out the best in everyone, or not... This weekend I found an unsigned letter. I'm guessing it was written by a girl based on the large, rounded printing. Also, I've never heard of a guy born after Lord Byron who expressed his feelings in writing. Of course, if all of the conversations I am subjected to on a daily basis about video games were transcribed, that would be a different thing. I continue to be amazed how deeply some people's feelings run over video games. In fact, I feel that I spend more time listening to people describe video games than they could possibly spend actually playing video games, but I know that isn't true.

But back to the point -- in true English honors format, the letter begins with a thesis statement, namely "I am mad at you for two reasons, one you already know, and I know the other isn't my buisness (sic), but still."

Such a maddening lack of detail. Come on, kid, if you're going to commit anything at all to writing, you might as well tell us what's going on even if it isn't your business. Or mine, for that matter.

It continues: "I just hate it how your (sic) all up on Sara and you guys aren't even going out, and that just shows me what kind of person you are, or have become, & I don't like it & I don't care if you don't like it & you don't want to be friends with me."

I have to admit, I'm not sure exactly what "all up on" someone really entails. Is this "hooking up"? I'd like to believe (based on handwriting analysis) that the writer is in grade school, but this is the point when I throw my hands in the air and say something about these kids today. Certainly Sara's morals are being impugned in any case. (There you go, Jeff and Rvan, there's your SAT word of the day.)

Finally, the letter wraps up in all of its run-on sentence glory "Fine just know that whatever your (sic) doing I think is wrong. Bye."

So there we have it. Drama. Other streets have the historic tour of Woodland. Here we just have the histrionic tour of Woodland.

It doesn't get any better than that.

A Fistful of Change

2011-06-05T22:06:00.000-07:00

Well, here we go -- it's been a week of huge changes for me and my sisters this week.

JoJo the Enforcer had a baby girl (or, as her now-middle child said after being told that the reason his mother wasn't there was that she had gone to the hospital to give birth, "Mommy went to the hospital so the doctor could take the baby out." -- sounds much simpler that way, doesn't it?) As far as I know the baby doesn't have an official name yet. I'm guessing it will be something other than "Poquito Tito", but who knows? Anyhow, apparently everything went as well as those sorts of things can go. I haven't seen any pictures yet, but I'm sure the baby looks just about like all newly born babies look. (Again, I haven't seen any pictures. This is purely me projecting based on every single other newborn human I've ever seen. They're hideous. Admit it. Kittens are much cuter.)

In other news, K-poo is switching jobs. While I'll miss the stories about her insane boss whose wife has been bankrolling the company for years, it will be nice for her to feel like she's not having to switch canoes in mid-stream every week. And possibly she'll move someplace that doesn't require her to store all of her belongings in an area smaller than my kitchen cabinet. (However, it really should be about the easiest move possible even without an elevator. We could probably just load everything into one box and toss it off the edge of the roof down to a car below.)

And finally, in really important news, I finally put the face plates back on the electrical socket and light switch in the bathroom that I painted a year ago. Also, half of the towel racks are back up. At this rate, I should be done sometime in 2015. Never let it be said that my life isn't exciting...

Return of the Kitten Cab

2011-05-29T20:40:00.000-07:00

During my junior year in vet school, I decided to commute by riding my bike to campus. It was about a twenty-three mile round trip and I quickly got in great shape. When Spring (aka "kitten season") rolled around, I wanted to keep riding but I needed some way to bring my bottle-feeding foster kittens along so I could take care of them during the day.

A bike trailer worked perfectly -- in cold weather a couple of heating packs kept the kittens warm during the ride, and in warm weather I could open the vents and keep a nice breeze flowing. The only problem was that riding on the narrow county roads, with no bike lane and cars going 70 mph, I got a lot of nasty looks from people who thought I shouldn't be endangering a child that way.

Then my friend Charlotte personalized the trailer and the kitten cab was born:

I still got some odd looks, but at least drivers didn't seem quite so angry. Puzzled, yes. Incredulous, yes. But not angry.

Anyhow, I can't really commute by bike anymore since it would be a 130 mile round trip on the freeways and I'll never be in that kind of shape, but I find myself reluctant to drive around Woodland on my days at home, so I dragged the bike and the trailer out of the garage today.

I was assuming I'd have to do a major overhaul on the bike since I haven't ridden it in five years, and it spent one year outside in Baton Rouge, but a little bit of oil and some air seem to have worked miracles. Sure, the chain would probably move even more freely if I finished getting the pine needles, dirt clods, and leaves out of it, but really, it's not that bad.

I may try riding it to the grocery store tomorrow -- it's technically within walking distance if something goes terribly wrong.

I wonder if the dogs will be too embarrassed to be seen in it...

The Mind Is A Terrible Thing...

2011-05-26T22:54:00.000-07:00

I woke up early this morning, interrupting a whole new stress dream. Generally I go with the tried and true -- teeth crumbling, unable to dial the telephone, just found out the final is coming up for a class I forgot I signed up for, etc. But this morning my brain decided to get creative on me -- while I was gone, someone broke into my place and set up a carnival on my property. There were cars parked all over the place and the people wouldn't leave.

It still makes me laugh. How does that make any sense at all? And why is my brain coming up with new ways to deal with stress?

I have to cut my brain a little slack, though, because at least it was asleep at the time. That's not nearly as bad as, say, someone adding a fifth button to a toolbar and somehow not noticing that it was a different height, width, and font than the other four it was right next to. (That's purely hypothetical, of course.)

Anyhow, somewhere between the complete illogic of the sleeping mind and the (hopefully) sensical waking mind, is one of the most recent stories from my lovely town. A group of senior citizens (85-95 years old) were driving to visit a friend in Davis (roughly ten miles away). The driver, who wasn't familiar with this area, got lost. He finally stopped to ask for directions in Gorman, which is over 300 miles away. As Jeff pointed out, that's over five hours of driving at the speed limit -- I can't even imagine how long that took these people.

So the lesson of the day is: be good to your brain, because you never know when you might need it.

Or possibly, to quote a classic Star Trek episode: "Brain, brain, what is brain?!"

The Reading Race

2011-05-22T19:07:00.000-07:00

Here's my current problem:

Now that's a problem because (ignoring the fact that apparently I'm trying to burn my house down, and I'll freely admit this was entirely my own fault):

And this:

If I become catatonic from reading withdrawal before the mail arrives on Tuesday, can somebody please plug in my Kindle and prop it up in front of me? Thanks.

The Redefining Moment

2011-05-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

This evening I'm celebrating the fact that starting at 9pm tonight (Thursday), I managed to work on the project that I'm supposed to be working on this week, and spent almost one uninterrupted hour (luxury!) doing so.

For those with decent math skills, that means that after approximately 32 hours of work, I've managed to do one hour of something useful. As a percentage, that's somewhere between awful and abysmal. Possibly that means that I should have just stayed home and partied for the first 31 hours of the work week. But probably that means that I should really redefine what I'm "supposed to be doing" to include all of the other things that I do that I like to forget about.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to redefine my vegetable garden as a "bindweed sanctuary" because that means that I'm doing a great job with it. There aren't a lot of things that will germinate and grow up through newspaper with eighteen inches of dirt on top, but bindweed doesn't have any problem with it.

Heck, while I'm at it, I'd like to redefine chocolate as a vegetable. It has to be at least as healthy as ketchup.

Anyhow, I hope everyone enjoys the rest of the week, and I'll see you all on Sunday for the post-Rapture looting parties.

Movie Magic

2011-05-15T20:41:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I'll watch a few movies. Not in the movie theaters, of course -- if I wanted to sit in an uncomfortable seat with a sticky floor with people talking all around me and music blasting at an ungodly volume, I'd go back to taking public transportation. No, I watch movies at home. In my own uncomfortable chair, with the music at a tolerable level. (The floor may or may not be sticky depending on how long it's been since one of the cats threw up on it.)

Anyhow, I don't have what you might call "highbrow" tastes. While I'm not quite as bad as JoJo the Enforcer (who gets confused if there are more than three characters), I'm not interested by too much subtlety. If I don't at least have some idea about what is going on in the first twenty minutes of a film, I won't watch it. Also, I don't like watching depressing movies. I don't care if that makes me a shallow person. If I wanted to watch people stuck in their miserable lives with no hope of anything getting better, I'd go back to taking public transportation.

I have no inherent problem with action films. I don't expect a plot that rivals a Russian novel. I don't expect a whole lot of character development. I don't even really expect there to be a lot of explanation for why the main character has to keep taking his shirt off to fight the bad guys. I'm okay with that.

What I don't understand is why so many of the films I've seen lately are so... boring. I watched the first two installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise over the weekend. If something has made it to number four, surely the first two should be reasonably good, right?

They were just sort of okay. There was a bit of a plot, and some of the characters were funny, but then, about every twenty minutes, there had to be a long drawn-out fight scene. And every time that happened, I'd wander around the house, check the refrigerator in case some chocolate had magically appeared, check my email, read a blog entry or two, and then go back to the movie.

Is it just me? Does anyone find those fight scenes interesting, no matter how well choreographed? Maybe it is just me. Maybe everyone else is at the edge of their seats.

But, frankly, if I wanted to see people fighting stupidly every twenty minutes, I'd go back to taking public transportation...

The Crown Has Passed

2011-05-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

(Blogspot was helping me procrastinate by being down for twelve hours...)

It has come to my attention that it may be time for me to pass the official Procrastination Princess crown to Rvan. Not because he's a princess (although he's not shy about doing a hip wiggle while crossing a major intersection during lunch hour), but because he may have managed to procrastinate even longer than I would have.

During this year's conference, he was supposed to present four two-hour talks in the course of two days. Even more impressively, two of those talks were at the exact same time, in two different rooms. That's some impressive scheduling, people.

Rvan's something of a legend in our office for his presentations. Often we have a betting pool on how long it will take before the first person in the audience is noticeably asleep. I think ten minutes might be the record. However, as much as you might expect people to fall asleep during a lecture (especially after a hard night discussing engineering in the bar), the person giving the lecture still technically has to talk about something. And yet, as of the night before the first lecture, he still didn't have his presentations done.

I thought it was bad enough that he sent me something to proofread at 9pm (which was 11 pm in his timezone). Then I found out that he still had one presentation that he hadn't yet started.

So hats off to you, Rvan. You win the crown.

I'll find it and bring it in for you someday soon.

While I Was Sleeping

2011-05-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

Here's what I missed while I was sleeping last night:

1) My neighbors' house getting burgled (while they were asleep upstairs). Items stolen: laptop, wide-screen TV, iPhone, some cash.
2) My neighbors' daughter coming home at 2am and finding the front door wide open and apparently scaring off the burglars.
3) The police coming over to take statements and cruise the neighborhood to look for the people involved.

My neighbors have an elderly deaf semi-senile English Setter who slept through the event as well. I tried to convince them to take Ginger the Wonder Dog in case the people come back, but no luck.

These neighbors also have the problem of a bee hive within the wall of their house. It turns out that there is no way to convince bees to move somewhere else once they have set up shop in an inaccessible place. The beekeeper tried vacuuming the bees out but couldn't get to the necessary spot. Apparently the only way to get the bees out alive would be to remove a three foot section of the exterior wall of their house.

Talking to the beekeeper was interesting -- he's one of those people that is passionate about what he does, and also really, really likes to hear himself talk. He teaches classes on beekeeping at the university -- if I needed more responsibilities around the house, I'd consider it, but for now I think I'll just buy my honey at Nugget. Or maybe I'll try to get honey out of my neighbors' wall.

Anyhow, here are a couple of random pictures I took yesterday. See how artistic they are?

Yes, that's me. Artistic. Ansel Adams' got nothing on me.

Welcome To The Glades Of Hell

2011-05-05T22:35:00.001-07:00

In the great cycle of corporate life, we have returned to the "air fresheners in the bathrooms" stage.

Let me explain something about this building. This isn't a bus station filled with thousands of travelers who haven't had access to a shower in days and who have been forced to eat questionable food from roadside stands and have the GI distress to prove it. This building is lightly stocked with professionals (more or less) who may have questionable eating habits, but it's by choice. The bathrooms are cleaned thoroughly in the evening, and tidied up at some point after lunch. In other words, these bathrooms are pretty darn clean.

Yet every few years the facilities management people decide that what we need is air fresheners, and lots of them. They install them, a bunch of people complain, the vandalism of the air fresheners starts, they stop restocking them, and eventually they take them down. We've gone through at least two or three cycles since I've been there.

The most memorable models were the ones mounted at eye level around the bathroom that squirted out a mist every minute or so. My cubicle neighbor Jon got in trouble when they finally realized that he was the one removing all the batteries after they went through and restocked them every day.

This time around they installed an industrial strength air freshener (with no batteries) in every stall. That's four air fresheners in a fairly small space, or at least twice the recommended installations based on the website from the company that sells these things. It's not too bad while there's a fair amount of traffic during the day, but after about six PM I'm usually the only woman in the building. Then the "precise dose of pure designer fragrance, odor neutralizer, and air freshener" builds up to the point that I'm hit with a palpable miasma when I open the door. It's so strong that it actually hurts my throat.

After waiting a week in vain to see if the things would calm down, I finally did what I do best (or at least most): I complained to Rvan. He passed along my complaint to the facilities person, and she sent back mail saying there wasn't any way to control the things -- the only way to decrease the stench would be to get rid of one or more of the units. Rvan replied to her that the solution was fine and thanked her.

Of course, it's now been a few more days and all four dispensers are still on the wall in the women's restroom. In the meantime, Jon tells me that he "heard" that the dispensers can be removed by sliding them towards the ceiling, and he also "heard" that a few of them have somehow ended up in the trash in the men's bathroom. Purely rumors, of course.

I think it might be time for the rumors to hit the women's bathroom as well...

May Day! May Day!

2011-05-01T22:49:00.000-07:00

It feels odd -- now that I don't have to reinstall the operating system on my Mac every few hours, I've freed up a large chunk of time in my week.

I celebrated on this May Day weekend by lounging on the cat porch and reading. I did finally get up and mow my lawn late this afternoon because my 65 year old neighbor only mowed one half of it on Friday. Lazy bastard.

I also planted some seeds, although since I didn't label any of the pots, your guess about what I'll be getting is as good as mine. I only planted things I like, though, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Unless, of course, I planted something like beans which need a lot of space.

But I think I know what sprouting beans look like since Eric did that LD50 experiment with bean plants and turpentine in seventh grade. Had he labeled it an LD50 experiment, it might have gone over better. However, calling the science fair project "How much turpentine does it take to kill a bean plant?" makes it seem like a typical boy trying to kill things. Somehow I skated through those years without ever having to do a science fair project. It's just as well. I'd hate to think of what I would have come up with.

Many years later JoJo managed to turn in the same project two or three years in a row. I don't think I ever heard about what K-poo did.

These days, as far as I can tell, the science fair is a chance for the parents to do all the work, but I think even Liam could probably handle "Does Mold Grow Better In Light or Darkness?"

On the other hand, I'm sure he'll ask someone to do it for him anyway...

More Attntion To Detail

2011-04-28T23:21:00.001-07:00

One of the contractors working on the project is leaving soon and sent out a good-bye message today. Here is what it says, in part:

"Dear All,
I want to bid farewell to you all and inform you that I am leaving my position at []. Tomorrow is my last day at work. I have enjoyed working for this company and I appreciate having had this wonderful opportunity to work with you all."

Pretty standard stuff, right? Except that it actually does say "inform you that I am leaving my position at []." I didn't redact that.

The person who's leaving seems like a nice enough guy, so I couldn't really send the following:

"Dear [],
We appreciate all your hard work during your time here. Good luck in your future endeavors and keep in touch!"

But I thought about it...

Have You Seen This Computer?

2011-04-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

Remember the news story about the garden gnome that was traveling the world? It was stolen out of someone's garden (in England, I think) and then the owners kept getting pictures of the gnome posed in various locations around the world.

Well, after re-installing the operating system on my Mac for the third time because the internal drive keeps getting corrupted, I ordered a new one online. (I've re-installed the OS twice since then, as well.) I love my Mac, but in computer years, my Mac is like that 114 year old man who just died. And apparently it has Alzheimers.

Naturally the new computer arrived at work on Friday when I wasn't there. Despite the office being a locked and "guarded" building, multiple thefts have occurred in recent months, so I sent Rvan mail and asked him to lock it up someplace.

First he sent me mail apologizing for getting fingerprints on the screen.

A few hours later he casually mentioned that it boots quickly.

I'm beginning to think I should put its picture on a milk carton.

Artist of the Ephemeral

2011-04-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

Today I'm celebrating the ephemeral nature of things.

I did my taxes -- the money comes in, it goes out, and I expect to hear from the IRS in the next two months with corrections to everything I did wrong on my forms. (It's pretty much a yearly event. I feel like we're on a first name basis.) I can't decide if this is the earliest I've ever filed my taxes (more than 24 hours ahead of the deadline!) or one of the latest times I've filed my taxes (since the deadline is three days later this year).

Ginger was completely freaked out by a group of churchgoers waving large palm fronds as we walked down Main Street. Since I thought it was Easter, it kind of freaked me out, too. However, this explains why when I saw a smallish child carefully looking in the flower beds of a front lawn and I asked him if he was looking for eggs he answered with a scornful "No!". (He was looking for sweet peas that he had planted, or something like that. We both quickly got bored with the conversation and wandered in our different directions.)

And for the second time in six months I had to erase the internal drive on my Mac and re-install the operating system. I'm thinking that suggests that there is actually a real hardware problem. Also, it means that everything I've added to the internal drive in the last six months is gone. But... I haven't put anything on the internal drive in the last six months that I care about, with the exception of links to blogs that I used to read and had just started to reassemble in the last few weeks, and I can probably get most of those back from memory.

So there we have it. Things come, they go, and life goes on.

Because, Really, Why Wouldn't It Sell This?

2011-04-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

From the window of the "Seemingly-Always-Closed-But-Actually-Still-In-Business" used bookstore that I pass every morning:

It's a smattering of random paperbacks, and this:

Because what used bookstore doesn't carry bowling supplies? And how great is the tiny "Great for Line Dancing" remark under the shoes line?

I love Woodland.

My Kingdom For A Cat Porch

2011-04-10T21:17:00.001-07:00

The other sign of spring (in the "prophetic reading of entrails" sort of sense) is that I once again try to make the cat porch cat-proof.

This sounds like such a simple thing, but it's really not. I have to laugh at the initial assumption that regular screen mesh stapled to a 1x2 would contain the Houdini-with-daggers that is Guido. And if he's not trying to break out, his sister Crow is using her considerable heft to try to assist entropy in any way possible.

Last fall I tried to roof the porch with an oilcloth tarp. Aside from some brief moments when I thought it was going to bring down the entire structure, it worked well. Until it rained two weeks later. Nothing in the construction of the cat porch was rated to hold fifteen gallons of water. (I attempted to attach it in such a way that the water would run off, but my attempt was a complete failure.) Finally the tarp completely ripped off and it stayed that way all winter.

This year I went with a modification -- a sun screen. It's light-weight and "guaranteed" (says so on the bag so it must be true) to let water get through. And one of the accessories was a bag of clamps that could be pounded into wood to hold it on.

Unfortunately this meant getting on the top step of the step-stool with a hammer. Given my fear of heights and my general lack of coordination, this went about as well as it possibly could, by which I mean at least the emergency services didn't need to make an appearance.

Each clamp (and there were thirty of them) had to be held in place over my head while I hammered it into the pine. I got a little better as time went on, but in the beginning I would test the structural stability of the wood by itself with the hammer a few times, then I would test the structural stability of the end of my thumb with the hammer a few times, then my aim would improve and I would finally hit the clamp. I can't remember the last time I've had a blood blister. Before this weekend, that is.

So there we have it. Spring has officially sprung. And if Guido makes it onto the roof again, he's on his own.

Zoom zoom

2011-04-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

This time, as I continue my journey learning about responsible car ownership, I decided to try something new and replace the tires before I could feel the car bouncing around at higher speeds. (Did you know that often the tire will bulge out in a random spot as it gets worn down? It's true, and it's not like it didn't have any tread left.)

Since my usual method is to have the dealership change them when they call me up and tell me my tires are all about to blow out, I had to figure out where to go. There are at least four tire shops within three miles of my house. Who knew?

Naturally I was forced to make a decision about which tires to get. Despite my well-known cheapness, I bought the more expensive tires. Yeah, they're "performance" tires, which I guess might make a difference if I go a little too fast around a curve or get cut off by someone. More importantly, they're quieter than my old tires, so I don't have to crank the stereo up quite as high when I hit the freeway.

Of course, they're so much more quiet than the old tires that I found myself accidentally driving twenty miles per hour over the speed limit, wondering why my car was handling differently. Gusty crosswinds at 85 mph -- it's a good thing I had performance tires.

If anyone cares, they can go out and look at the tires and read the label (like Rvan did). Here is what I know: they have tread and they come in black.

Whatever.

The Mound of Dirt That Ate My Driveway

2011-04-03T21:25:00.000-07:00

Look at all the foxtails just waiting to dry out and be snorted up by my dogs...

Thursday morning, bright and early, the compost and shredded bark was delivered. I'll give the guy credit -- he managed to back a dump truck through my gate with about two inches on either side. I can't even back my Civic through that gate, although that says more about my backing skills than anything else. Anyhow, after he managed to fit the compost on the driveway and the bark mostly on the driveway and partially in the alley, he stood around for a while which made me wonder -- are you supposed to tip the dump truck driver? I mean, there was a delivery fee, after all. I hate this whole tipping thing. If he really was waiting for a tip, he eventually gave up and drove away.

Then I went to the lumber store. In case you're wondering how much you can fit in a Civic (with all the doors, windows, and trunk closed), the answer is: twenty-four six-foot 2x6" boards, plus another twenty-four three-foot 2x6" boards. And I still had room to sit in the car comfortably. It does, however, drive a little differently when loaded like that.

After unloading all the lumber and getting most of the shredded bark out of the alley, it was time to take a nap. Or it should have been. But I knew if I started down that road I'd still have a pile of compost sitting on the driveway at the end of summer. Also, I couldn't close the gate because a mound of compost and bark was in the way and people walking down the alley might see the state of the garden. So I did some physical labor for while.

I put together one whole raised bed and filled it with compost. Luckily, the rest of the M-braces hadn't been delivered, so I had an excuse to go sit down after that. Unfortunately, my neighbor came over to deliver the M-braces that evening, but since it was almost dark at that point I felt justified in not going back to work.

Friday morning I woke up and realized that at the pace of one raised bed per day I was going to never finish because my attention span is about three days at most. So Friday I managed to put in two more raised beds.

On Saturday I still had this much left,

which was a little depressing, but my shoveling muscles were getting stronger. Basically, I kicked ass on Saturday and got down to this:

Oh, and the garden, that was coming together as well:

Of course, the camera angle is carefully chosen so that the remaining weeds aren't shown, but you can't have everything. Anyhow, in three months or so I should have the world's most expensive salsa.

But the important thing is that the gate is closed again.

What Happens in New Orleans, Stays in New Orleans

2011-03-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

During my internship in Hell (aka, Baton Rouge, a city with all the charm of a suburb, the traffic of Los Angeles, the heat and humidity of the American South, and the safety of the slums of Brazil), the exotics department did field trips with the senior students on the rotation to the zoo in New Orleans. This was the year after Katrina and Rita passed through, so at that time New Orleans made Baton Rouge look like a great place to live.

The vet school was associated with the zoo, so there was some justification for this trip, but nobody in their right mind would ever let an untrained person do anything to a zoo animal, so essentially it was a long drive there, a few hours of standing around watching someone else do something, a few more hours of wandering around the zoo, and then a long drive back in the afternoon thunderstorm. Driving a passenger van along a narrow causeway over Lake Pontchartrain in not-quite gale force winds and blinding rain is something that I'd never like to repeat in my life.

Before I relate the following, I'd just like to point out that I was not involved in this incident in any way, shape, or form.

One of my fellow small animal interns was rotating through the exotics department when it was time to take the students to New Orleans. The day passed quietly enough, and they were heading back when they decided to stop for fast food. They parked the car, went inside, got their food, and were piling back into the van for the ride back when someone noticed an injured pigeon wandering on the pavement of the drive-through lane.

This being a van full of conscientious vet students (plus one fairly disinterested intern), they felt the need to save the pigeon, but before anyone could grab it, another car drove over it and left it seriously injured but alive.

At this point they all knew it needed to be euthanized, but the van had no supplies of any kind. So, with two students guiding her, my fellow intern, in a large white van with with vet school logo displayed prominently on all sides, carefully backed over the pigeon and squished it dead.

I can't say it was necessarily the wrong thing to do, but I probably wouldn't have come back and told everyone about it afterward had it been me...

Rapunzel, I'm not

2011-03-20T21:18:00.000-07:00

On Friday it was time for my biennial hair cut. Yes, that's biennial as in every two years. I'd spend even less time in my life getting my hair cut, but at some point long hair just gets really, really irritating. Like when you try to turn your head to check your blind spot and you can't because your hair is trapped between you and the car seat. So in the interests of public safety, I had it chopped off.

To give an example of how long my hair was, they took off ten inches (the length needed to donate to Locks of Love) and I still have shoulder-length hair.

Every time I get my hair cut, I try to make it obvious from the start that I don't really care what they do as long as a) it's shorter afterward, and b) I'm not expected to spend any time on it in the morning. Yet every time I spend the whole twenty minutes getting asked whether I want layers, and if I want it shorter (or longer in the front), and whether I want it to frame my face, etc. I don't care. Really. I just don't care. Just stop slowing things down by asking all the questions and cut my hair however you want to.

What really makes me laugh, though, is that every time I get it cut, when it's really obvious that I haven't had it cut for over a year, the stylist recommends that I come back to get it trimmed in six weeks. I try not to laugh at them, but why would they think that's going to happen? In six weeks it will look exactly the same except a little longer. Why would I need to get it cut again?

Anyhow, now I just have to endure tomorrow when everyone must exclaim "You got your hair cut!" like it's some kind of major life event. (I can't really blame people for this -- I probably do the same thing. It's a way to cover up your surprise when you almost don't recognize someone.)

I think I should just start wearing a baseball cap everywhere.

I Dub Thee...

2011-03-17T23:48:00.000-07:00

I've worked with a lot of people over the years, some really good, some really, really bad, and a bunch somewhere in the middle. At one point Rvan had a list of all the people who had worked on and subsequently left the project and it was over one hundred when I lost track. Even given the name, I can't come up with a face for many of those people.

So you know someone must be pretty spectacular (in a negative fashion) to be really memorable. And it's really not a good sign if someone has a nickname.

(This doesn't apply to Rvan, of course, whom I knew as Rvan long before I was ever introduced to him and learned his real first name.)

- The name "40 Grit" was Jeff's creation, which is only fitting since Jeff had to work with him. You know how really fine sandpaper smooths a surface, but as the number of the paper goes down the surface stays rougher? Well forty grit is about the point where you're just irritating any smooth surface. That explains the name pretty well.

- "Eustace" was named after a character in a R.D. Wingfield book. In the book, "Useless Eustace" was a particularly inept bank robber. Our Eustace wasn't a bank robber as far as I know, but other than that he lived up to the name. For months when asked about the task he was working on he proclaimed that he would be done in "two weeks" while never showing signs of getting any closer. In fact, he was causing negative progress because at least once or twice a day he would lock up his window manager and have to get someone else to log into his machine and kill off the process. It's not like the cause of the problem was any big secret -- every time we had to stop and take care of his problem we suggested that he stop trying to set a breakpoint in the middle of a button click handler, but he never got the hint. Finally I got tired of dealing with him, so I came in over the weekend and wrote the project he was working on from scratch, so we were able to finally get rid of him. Now he lives on only as a test user in my database.

Anyhow, mean? Probably. Funny? Definitely at the time. Even now it makes me laugh, which is good since otherwise...

Ouch, You're Hurting My Feelings. No, Really. I Promise.

2011-03-13T22:04:00.000-07:00

In the latest skirmish of the battle to convince people I'm not really an "employee", the people who pay me money are threatening to take things away. I'm trying to be pissed off about this on general principle, but the things they are threatening to take away:

1) My phone at work, and
2) My MS Outlook account with its 250 MB (that's not a typo) limit that means that a significant part of the work life is spent trying to dump things as fast as possible because people keep sending 10MB attachments.

This is like someone telling you that you've been arrested and your sentence is a free lifetime supply of chocolate and a new car. I'll be the envy of every employee at the company.

So yeah, even though we're at the "everyone needs to be fired" point of the current release, things are looking up.

Sure, I don't get paid vacations, but we all know that I'm not leaving California ever again anyhow.

And at least I don't have non-refundable plane tickets to a country that the US State Department just issued a travel advisory for...

It Must Be Spring!

2011-03-10T23:08:00.000-08:00

I can always tell when it's Spring because I have the sudden urge to make my backyard look better. Generally I then do one thing (or half of one thing) and then give up for another year. This explains why my yard looks the way it does.

This year I think I'm going to put raised beds in the garden. My neighbor came up with this cool thing called the "M Brace" (that's my neighbor Jill in the video) which makes raised beds really easy to put together. I'm thinking I might be able to get all the way through putting these together before I run out of steam.

(On a side note, the business is apparently doing really well, which is great. I'm hoping they make enough money to retire very comfortably without making so much money that they feel they have to move someplace else. In any case, I'll let them pick up the tab on the next fence.)

I'm glad I have the neighbors that I do -- the people two houses away complained about my neighbor's chickens and said that their grown son was afraid to bring his baby over because chickens carry diseases. We're talking five chickens in the world's nicest (and cleanest) chicken coop. Unbelievable.

Had those neighbors complained about my (theoretical) chickens, they might have suffered the same fate as the orange stray...

Don't Mess With Me

2011-03-06T21:02:00.000-08:00

For the past year or so I've been catching glimpses of an orange cat outside my house. Based on his head size, I was pretty sure he was an intact stray, but I could never get close enough to him to check.

Then he started standing on the ledge and spraying my window.

This afforded me a great view of the "wedding vegetables" (or "garden vegetables", as Rvan likes to refer to the phrase), and also afforded me some incentive to catch the little bastard and deal with him. So over the weekend I trapped him, had him neutered and vaccinated, and released him again.

Things I learned:
1) My county animal services rents traps for $5 a day. Such a bargain.
2) Don't assume it's going to take multiple days to trap the cat. I figured it would take a few days of catching and releasing my neighbor's cats before I got lucky, when in fact I put the trap out, went to check on it two hours later, and found the cat I was looking for throwing a fit inside.
3) Don't trap a cat on a Friday night. Many places will do spays and neuters of feral cats, but most will do so Monday - Friday. There's no safe way to get food and water into a cat trap, and there's no litter box. Staying in the trap for three days wasn't really an option.
4) Having friends is really helpful. I sent out a plea on facebook and two people who were senior students while I was a resident offered to fit the neuter into their Saturday schedules.
5) Driving with a tomcat in the car for forty-five minutes may make it time to buy a new car. If you've never experienced the special pong of tomcat urine, let's just say that your sinuses may never be the same. The closer of the two places I could take him was in Elk Grove, which is slightly less than an hour away when it's raining...

So if I ever need to do this again, I'll plan things a little better.

There are two possible morals for this story.

One has something to do with civic responsibility.

The other is a cautionary tale: Don't piss me off or I will hunt you down and remove your testicles.

Any questions?

Compulsive Much?

2011-03-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

The question of the day: What do illiterate people do with their brains all day long?

That's actually a real question, not a put down. I can't even imagine trying to get by in this society without being able to read. That's one of the key "I wouldn't be where I am right now" forks in the road.

But I really meant that more on a minute to minute level. My brain goes into its own version of hyperventilating when I'm stuck in one place and there aren't words printed in front of me. For example, I read the ad copy on the bottle of detergent while I'm doing the dishes. I read all the bumper stickers and license plate holders while I walk the dogs. The two toaster ovens at work have similar but not identical wording on the glass fronts about not opening the door if something is on fire inside. (That last one came in handy at home this evening. Mmm. Burning butter on homemade rye toast. Does it get any better than that?) I know this because I have nothing else to read in that corner of the kitchen while I'm waiting for my dinner to heat up, so I read the wording on one, then the wording on the other, then back to the first, and so on until either my food is hot or I wander over to read the OSHA posters.

I think I may pay for that compulsive reading by an inability to notice anything that isn't written. I am possibly the least observant person I've ever met. I have to look at my house to know what color the paint is. I only noticed one car parked partially under another one because the smashed up one had words on it. Otherwise I probably would have walked by and never even seen it.

I'm probably not alone in this compulsion, but it really does make me wonder. What would I have been like in a non-literate society?

Let me read up on that and get back to you...

Working On My Fitness

2011-02-27T21:49:00.000-08:00

Embarrassing admission of the day: I bought Ke$ha's album and I've been listening to it while working at home. Just thought I'd get that out of the way.

Anyhow, I've been thinking lately that maybe I should work on my upper body strength at some point. Usually I think about this while I'm lying in bed, or watching something on hulu.com. Obviously this need to get stronger hasn't interfered with my lifestyle at all.

I realized today, though, that I don't really need to join a gym or get a set of weights -- I just need to do more yardwork. I used the weedwhacker to knock back some of the weeds engulfing the yard, and an hour afterward I found that I couldn't actually lift my arms. It was an oddly dissociative experience -- my brain was thinking "lift" and nothing happened. And it wasn't like I was working for hours -- I have a rechargeable weed trimmer, so it only lasts for about twenty minutes (which is generally about as long as my attention span, so it works out).

The danger of doing yard work, especially out front, is that I have to come up with something to talk about when I see my neighbors. Luckily this week after Larry, my 65 year old neighbor, apologized for not cutting the other half of my lawn (because he ran out of gas, literally), we got to talk about the trenchless sewer line replacement. Sure, I spent thousands of dollars on a pipe in the ground, but at least we had something to talk about.

I think this may be why people renovate their houses...

Comparatively speaking...

2011-02-24T22:20:00.000-08:00

It's time for my car to have its 150,000 mile tune-up. Actually, it was time for that 5,000 miles ago, but I'm really good at procrastinating.

I'm trying a new place this time. Normally I go to the dealership, because... I don't really know why I go there. It's inconvenient and I always feel like I'm getting ripped off. Note that I have no information one way or another as to whether I really am getting ripped off, so my feeling about it is the only thing I have to go on. Anyhow, I've decided that if I'm going to get fleeced, I might as well go somewhere that's conveniently located, so why not the place that I walk the dogs past every morning?

When I called for an appointment, the guy asked if I had the maintenance records. That's where my ability to pretend that I'm an adult fell apart. I'm supposed to save that stuff? Now they tell me?

I guess I was supposed to learn by example on this one. Thinking back, I'm fairly sure my parents kept a folder of everything related to each car they owned. However, my parents also kept a log book and wrote down the mileage every time they put gas in the car, so obviously they're just insane. (This obsessive record keeping was useful when the gas gauge stopped working in the van, though, until the odometer stopped working as well.)

So now I have to go into my new mechanic's tomorrow morning and admit that I have no idea what anyone has ever done with the car. Great.

I was feeling somewhat stupid because of this, but then I happened to talk to Jon (my cubicle neighbor who looks a lot like Santa Claus). His Prius was in the shop Wednesday because it needed a new battery -- not the regular battery but the other one.

Then I found out that he hadn't done any maintenance on that car for the last five years, also known as 85,000 miles. None. Not even an oil change.

At least I've done... something. I just can't prove it.

The Theme of the Day Is Things That Stink

2011-02-20T21:35:00.000-08:00

This weekend I decided to try the great sourdough experiment. It was a learning experience. There's nothing wrong with learning experiences. Really.

However, I'm thinking of throwing out the starter and retrying the grand experiment again in June. Here's why:

- Yeast are about like me when it's cold. They don't want to do anything. The instructions on the sourdough starter package talk about letting the starter sit at 80 degrees. There isn't anywhere in my house that is 80 degrees at the moment. The gas oven doesn't even have a pilot light, so the yeast were sitting around doing nothing at 65 degrees like the rest of us.

- When I finally did get the yeast excited, I found that sourdough starter smells... sour. With the house closed up the entire kitchen smells like rotting milk. This is not exactly the homey kitchen smell I was going for.

On the plus side, I made a pretzel, some rolls, and some decent flatbread this weekend. The flatbread is pretty much welded to the pan I made it in, so it's a little difficult to eat -- next time things will be different.

Also in the learning experiences category this weekend, I found out that they used something called "Orangeburg pipe" for the sewer when they built my house 53 years ago. Here are the relevant sentences from the wikipedia entry:

Lack of strength causes pipes made of Orangeburg to fail more frequently than pipes made with other materials. The useful life for an Orangeburg pipe is about 50 years under ideal conditions, but has been known to fail in as little as 10 years. It has been taken off the list of acceptable materials by most building codes.

Oh yeah. The things you learn...

Warm, mushy love

2011-02-17T23:20:00.000-08:00

I managed to skate past Valentine's Day this year without contributing to the billions (seriously, the number is in the billions) of dollars that Americans spend on cheap crap on the made-up holiday.

I also managed to just skate past the last blog posting deadline. Oh well.

But today I am here to extol the virtues of the most amazing meal in the world. Yes, that's right, it's time to talk about cream of asparagus over toast.

After twenty-something years of living on my own, I've finally accepted that most people view this combination with a mixture of horror and superiority. To them, I say... well, this is a family blog, so I won't say it, but you know what I mean.

Toasted bread, with warm salty, fatty Campbell's Cream of Asparagus soup (made with half a can of milk, mind you) combine together to make the best comfort food ever. A little bit mushy as the soup soaks into the bread, but still chewy with the crusts of the toast maintaining their texture -- it's the perfect foul-weather food.

In fact, the only reason that more people don't eat this on a regular basis (as far as I can tell) is that is has become quite difficult to buy Campbell's Cream of Asparagus.

So if you happen to be in a different grocery store and you see some on the shelf, well, I know of at least six people who would envy you...

YaYu! (Gesundheit!)

2011-02-10T22:02:00.000-08:00

So I went out to dinner on Monday night with K-poo and Patrick at YaYu in Oakland.

Those Oakland street planners really don't like to give people much warning in the way of street signs or indications that a lane is about to end. This is why I try not to drive to Oakland very often, which may be what they intended. They also seem to be completely avoiding any street maintenance on Lakeshore -- that way they can save money both on the materials for the street and putting up speed limit signs. If you go any faster than 25 mph you run the risk of doing major damage to either your car frame or your tires. As my cubicle neighbor Jon (who lives in Oakland) says, they've decided to spend the money on police instead. He's okay with that.

Anyhow, YaYu is an Ethiopian restaurant, which just seems all wrong since it doesn't fall into the previously documented [color][body of water] theme in naming Ethiopian restaurants. Be that as it may, the food was pretty good although no nightclub activity was to be had, so it felt a little odd.

Things I found out from K-poo during dinner:

- Her welding class is actually welding and woodworking, and she's making a leaning (intentionally, not like the Tower of Pisa) bookcase. She's also officially the furthest (or possibly farthest) behind of anyone in the class, which she claims is because she lets everyone else use the equipment.

- Two weeks ago she bought a bag of taffy-flavored cookies because the grocery stocker convinced her that they would "change her life". She claims the purchase was to allow her to stock up on earthquake supplies. Yeah, that went about as well as you would expect. The cookies are gone, although to be fair, there were a few tiny earthquakes that she is using for justification.

- My sister claims she is actually Latina. (This is news to me, and to my parents, too, I bet.) I won't even try to reproduce the logic behind that statement.

- She's volunteering for some group that takes disadvantaged kids out on boats. They aren't allowed to throw the kids overboard if they are being obnoxious. (I asked.) (Jeff asked the same question when I relayed this information.)

- There's some guy...

So, yeah, it was a fine dinner. I also got to hear some good stories from Patrick about a place he worked that only had six people -- one of the owners admitted that she didn't know what he did during his performance evaluation (because she was clueless, not because he was useless). That's always a good sign. Almost as good as your boss falling asleep during a one-on-one meeting.

Hopefully my contribution to the Oakland economy will allow them to pave the street sometime soon. They have a year or so before the next time I go back...

Change Is Good, Redux

2011-02-06T22:14:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the memories...

2011-02-03T23:20:00.000-08:00

Here's the thing -- as far as I can tell, my brother Jeff sprang into being fully formed (or malformed as the case may be) at the age of about twenty. I remember a significant portion of his childhood, because, you know, I was in the area for all but the first three years. He, on the other hand, while technically present during the entirety of his childhood, doesn't remember more than about five minutes of it.

I can describe most of the layout of the house we moved away from when I was three or four years old. (My mother has corroborated what I remember, so it's not like I'm making the whole thing up.) My brother... not so much.

I also remember being in a Girl Scout troop when we lived in Missouri, except that in that location at that time there was a step in between Brownies and Girl Scouts called June Bugs. The uniform looked pretty similar to the Girl Scout uniform. I don't remember selling cookies, but we did sell a book of recipes. We learned to country dance in someone's basement. (Missouri, in winter, you're going to be in the basement. Better than "camping" at the mall like my sister's Girl Scout troop in southern California did.) I know that this thing happened because even if my memories were falsified, my mom kept my sash with all of the useless badges on it.

Yet... there's no evidence of this whole June Bugs thing anywhere, and everything is on the internet.

So, in a world where my normal phrase is "pictures or it didn't happen", did I even have this childhood I remember? I'm leaning toward the abducted by aliens theory myself...

In quest of a new series

2011-01-30T21:56:00.000-08:00

So lately I've been watching a show called "Da Vinci's Inquest" about a Canadian coroner -- it's a bit like a Law & Order: Vancouver, only better.

(As a side note, one of my friends recently moved from California to Vancouver, and in trying to get everything sorted out has found that a significant percentage of Americans involved in customer service have no idea that Vancouver is in a foreign country. I can't say I'm surprised.)

Anyhow, you can tell that this is a Canadian show because hardly anybody gets shot, and one person was killed with a hockey stick. I have to admit that I'm still a little unclear on the concept of what exactly a coroner does in Canada, but I think I may also be unclear about what a coroner does in the U.S. aside from writing a book about Marilyn Monroe, so it's possible they do the same thing.

In the show Vancouver seems like a pretty nice place to live, although I've noticed that it always seems to be summer... almost like winter in Vancouver might not be fun to film outdoors.

The other thing I've found about the series is that all of the actors fall into that category of "hey, I've seen that guy in something". Hardly ever the lead, but usually enough of a part that I think about it for fifteen minutes until I finally realize that he was the short guy that kept jumping through wormholes on that other show for three episodes. It's a bit distracting.

So, yeah, if you're in search of a new police procedural to watch which doesn't have much in the way of police or procedure, it's a fine show.

Just watch out for those crazy Canadians and their hockey sticks.

Rhymes with Moron-ge

2011-01-27T22:28:00.000-08:00

I spent a large chunk of my afternoon at work trying to get rid of some of the 1,700 messages sitting in my inbox. That's about 1,699 more things than I can think about at any one time. Obviously I have fallen a little behind.

In completely unrelated news, I found this lovely orange this morning.

I guess one could say that I technically "stole" the orange since I just walked off with it, although I think it may have been within my legal rights. It was sitting on the public sidewalk near an orange tree.

I don't know the people who own the tree. I'm pretty sure they would have been okay with me taking the orange if they're reasonable sorts since there were a lot of oranges still on the tree and a few more on the ground under it.

I could even make the claim that I was doing a public service by keeping the sidewalk clear. I might have even saved the homeowners from a lawsuit. After all, a morbidly obese woman on a motorized scooter zipped by me down the sidewalk mere moments later. She might have crashed if the orange had still been there (although I'm guessing that between her and the scooter the poor orange would have been crushed without even leaving a noticeable bump).

Anyway I took it, and I'm glad. My little Mandarin orange tree has a limited supply.

But I probably wouldn't have done it if the owners had been watching...

Change Is Good

2011-01-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

Over the years I've received a lot of memorable memos. Not necessarily memorable in the way the writer intended -- usually it was a completely unintended effect.

My favorite was the stiffly worded memo about not watching porn at work sent by our devoutly Catholic director (who had a picture of the pope on the wall above his marital bed).

The worst was a memo sent by someone very high up in the company congratulating the "heroes" from the company who rushed to Columbine after the massacre and set up temporary cell phone towers so the media could make telephone calls.

One of the oddest, though, was a memo from someone in a position of power that included the sentence "Change is good". It wasn't qualified in any way -- according to that person, any change whatsoever was a positive move. I hope it is written on his tombstone when he dies.

What made me remember this was my walk downtown yesterday morning. I passed a shop without a visible name that had a banner claiming "Under New Management!" and there was red sheeting covering all but the front few feet from view. I had to think about it for a while to figure out what was there before since about half of the downtown spaces are vacant. Then it hit me -- Jim's Store was gone.

What is Jim's Store when it's under new management? Obviously the new management couldn't figure it out either since they took down the name sign that used to hang in the window.

So... change is good? Maybe, but they've taken away the skulls, knives, and dragon clocks and put up a Valentine's Day display so I'm not that hopeful.

Five more minutes...zzzz

2011-01-20T21:45:00.000-08:00

At 7:30 this evening I realized I was suddenly really, really tired. Possible causes?

- I had just finished deploying the latest release to the production server, something that I find both very stressful and very tedious.

- After the deployment I went back to my own work, which involved testing this little change that I made that affected all sorts of things and testing is just boring (although necessary).

- I was heading into hour nine of the workday.

- I'm getting old. (This was Jeff's contribution. Please note that he is three years older than I am.)

or...

- The night before last I went to bed at 10:30 pm and ended up reading until 3:30 am, which gave me a whopping three hours to sleep before I had to get up again.

See, this is the great thing about being an adult and the reason that you couldn't pay me enough money to go back through childhood again. If I want to stay up and read, well then, I can damn well stay up late and read. Of course, the downside is that I have responsibilities and I will pay for not getting enough sleep, but still, it's the principle of the thing.

I think I'll have brownies and bagels for breakfast tomorrow...

Yet Another Nile?

2011-01-16T21:08:00.000-08:00

I first ate Ethiopian food as a freshman in college. My suite mates and I drove into San Diego to the Blue Nile Restaurant (or possibly the Red Nile Restaurant -- I went to both over the next few years, and I can't remember which was which. It was definitely some color of Nile though.) The Nile of Color was pretty authentic as far as restaurants go. Everyone who worked there was actually from Ethiopia, and it was an Ethiopian singles bar as the evening went on. The food was amazing, and I (the person who fully delights in the fact that nobody can ever make me leave California ever again) love going to Ethiopian restaurants, even to this day.

A few years ago I played floor hockey in an informal team in Sacramento and we made it a habit to go to the Ethiopian place nearby after every practice. This place was called Addis Ababa (not a Nile) which I thought was a little obvious, but I guess if you want Americans to know what type of cuisine you're serving, you don't have very many choices.

I actually tried making Ethiopian food one time (back when we used to cook for each other once a week, leading to the infamous Spikes of Death and Neopolitan Turkey Loaf meals). For the most part Ethiopian food is similar to a curry, but it's served on a pancake-like sourdough bread called injera. I knew I was going to have problems getting that right, but I found a recipe which involved using sourdough starter and letting it ferment for 48 hours.

It turns out that bread fermentation involves significant expansion. Yes, bread rises. The injera didn't just rise, it overflowed the bowl I had left it in and dripped down the wire mesh cabinet and all over the floor. Bowl propagation at its finest. (That joke's for you Rvan.) There's nothing like dried, semi-fermented sourdough mix to really make a difficult cleanup. For the record, though, in the end it tasted pretty close to what I thought it should.

Anyhow, someday I might try making it again. But this time I'll definitely use a bigger bowl.

Not Very Sporting Of You, Old Chap!

2011-01-13T21:33:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me today that the kids in my family didn't do much in the way of team sports. Jeff came the closest, with water polo in high school, but I got the feeling that game was as much about trying to drown your opponents as passing the ball around.

K-Poo and JoJo the Enforcer did gymnastics, which is about as individual as it gets. JoJo also tried out for soccer one year, but after she put another girl in a full leg cast, she was (inexplicably!) not chosen for the team. Eric was on a basketball team for one season if I remember correctly -- I believe they lost every single game, which isn't too surprising if they were expecting the German peasant hillbilly genes to help out in any way.

I don't think I ever was involved with any sort of team sport. It shows, too -- if you put me on a soccer field I tend to kick the ball in a random direction to get it as far away from me as possible because there are all these people running at me. This is not really the attitude of a champion polo player either.

What I did do, a whole lot, as a kid is swim. I started competing when I was four or five and couldn't get out of it until I was about twelve. I was an okay swimmer, but again, the German hillbilly peasants are known for buoyancy but not so much for speed. Anyhow, I spent a lot of time in heavily chlorinated pools, and for many years my hair had that greenish tinge that only blond swimmers can get.

Team sports like soccer teach strategy and teamwork and how to knock someone down when the ref isn't looking. Swimming teaches you how to deal with boredom. You develop a really rich inner life while spending a few hours every day counting to four (breathe!) and staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool. Sometimes I would yodel underwater just for something different to do.

Ironically, swimming may have been the best preparation for my adult life. Sure I can't advance the ball or call out encouragement to my teammates, but I can stare at nothing for hours with the best of them...

Heinz 57

2011-01-09T22:25:00.000-08:00

I saw a news article recently about a Border Collie that could distinguish over one thousand different words. My first thought was "wow, that's pretty amazing" and then my second thought was "there is no way my black dog is part Border Collie".

Molly has a lot of things going for her: she's cute and fluffy, she always seems pretty happy, she doesn't care about fireworks or thunder (because she's deaf), she doesn't destroy the house when I leave, and she has finally figured out how to get on the bed without me showing her the step, but she's the spoon in a drawer full of knives when it comes to intelligence.

In the six months I've had Molly there have been many debates (often with perfect strangers) about what breed she is. Most people get thrown off by the white legs with black spots and think she must be a Border Collie. I think her inability to learn how to turn over a paper plate shoots that theory out of the water.

My current theory is that she's some sort of Spaniel mixed with Newfoundland. The Newfie part is mostly wishful thinking, but it would explain her coat and her goofiness.

I was thinking about doing one of those genetic tests on her, but my scam-alert goes off when I read reviews on them -- reproducibility doesn't seem to be a strong point for the labs that run these thing, which shows when people send samples from the same dog in twice and get completely different answers. So I'm not sure if it's worth sixty bucks for the entertainment.

In the end it doesn't really matter. If she can ignore the fact that I'm a German hillbilly peasant mix, I can live with not knowing what she might be. In the meantime I'm listing her breed as Clydesdale. It's a registered breed of the prestigious TKC (Theresa Kennel Club).

Reduce, Reuse, Plagiarize Yourself

2011-01-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

It has come to my attention that another year has passed, so I should come up with some resolutions or something. The good news is that I have some slightly used resolutions from last year that I can reuse. The bad news is that I can reuse them because I didn't accomplish them the first time through. Whatever.

Anyhow, I chickened out on the whole leg-amputation-to-get-down-to-my-ideal-weight thing, so I guess I'll just have to continue the gradual weight loss via diet and (a tiny bit of) exercise. It would be more effective, perhaps, if I weren't eating Ben & Jerry's while writing this. I'm still holding cutting off my hair in reserve as a last ditch effort if necessary.

The turning 42 plan worked well (yay me!), and I also remained single and childless, both of which were heartily celebrated upon my return from visiting the family over Christmas.

I got almost nowhere on the novel last year, and I'm tempted to restart what I've got. On the other hand, that means that I can still change the requirements. Oh wait, that's what we do at work. And they change the requirements all the time anyhow. But this year it's really going to happen.

My only other resolution is hire someone to clean my house on a regular basis. That will be enough quality of life improvement to make double rainbows appear everywhere.